In the picture "Necessity knows no Law" a poor woman with a child in her arms has entered a pawnshop to borrow money on her wedding-ring; in another, women of the poorer class are to be seen walking along with their soldier sons and husbands, who have been called out on active service. One of them clasps tightly to her breast her little child, the only one still remaining to her in life, whilst an aged widow presses the hand of her son with the sad presentiment that, even if he comes back to her, she will probably not have long to live after his return. Not only did Frank Holl paint stories for his countrymen, but he also painted them big in majuscule characters which were legible without spectacles, and he partially owed his splendid successes to this cheap sentimentality. Almost everywhere the interest of subject still plays the first part, and this slightly lachrymose trait bordering on _genre_, this lyrically tender or allegorically subtle element, which runs through English figure pictures, would easily degenerate into vaporous enervation in another country. In England portrait painting, which now, as in the days of Reynolds, is the greatest title to honour possessed by English art, invariably maintains its union with direct reality. By acknowledgment portrait painting in the present day is exceedingly earnest: it admits of no decorative luxuriousness, no sport with hangings and draperies, no pose; and English likenesses have this severe actuality in the highest degree. Stiff-necked obstinacy, sanguine resolution, and muscular force of will are often spoken of as an Englishman's national characteristics, and a trace of these qualities is also betrayed in English portrait painting. The self-reliance of the English is far too great to suffer or demand any servile habit of flattery: everything is free from pose, plain and simple. Let the subject be the weather-beaten figure of an old sailor or the dazzling freshness of English youth, there is a remarkable energy and force of life in all their works, even in the pictures of children with their broad open brow, finely chiselled nose, and assured and penetrative glance. And as portrait painting in England, to its own advantage and the benefit of all art, has never been considered as an isolated province, such pictures may be specified among the works of the most frigid academician as well as amongst those of the most vigorous naturalist. Frank Holl, who had such a Düsseldorfian tinge in his more elaborate pictures, showed at the close of his life, in his likenesses of the engraver Samuel Cousins, Lord Dufferin, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Wolseley, Mr. Gladstone, the Duke of Cleveland, Sir George Trevelyan, and Lord Spencer, a simple virility altogether wanting in his earlier works. They had a trenchant characterisation and an unforced pose which were striking even in England. It is scarcely possible to exhibit people more naturally, or more completely to banish from their