(_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the picture._)] The painter of the river-port of London and the arm of the Thames is _William L. Wyllie_, whose pictures unite so much bizarre grandeur with so much precision. One knows the port life of the Thames, with its accumulation of work, which has not its like upon the whole planet. Everything is colossal. From Greenwich up to London both sides of the river are a continuous quay: everywhere there are goods being piled, sacks being raised on pulleys, ships being laid at anchor; everywhere are fresh storehouses for copper, beer, sails, tar, and chemicals. The river is of great width, and is like a street populated with ships, a workshop winding again and again. The steamers and sailing vessels move up and down stream, or lie in masses, close beside one another, at anchor. Upon the bank the docks lie athwart like so many streets of water, sending out ships or taking them in. The ranks of masts and the slender rigging form a spider's web spreading across the whole horizon; and a vaporous haze, penetrated by the sun, envelops it with a reddish veil. Every dock is like a town, filled with huge vats and populated with a swarm of human beings, that move hither and thither amid fluttering shadows. This vast panorama, veiled with smoke and mist, only now and then broken by a ray of sunlight, is the theme of Wyllie's pictures. Even as a child he ran about in the port of London, clambered on to the ships, noted the play of the waves, and wandered about the docks; and so he painted his pictures afterwards with all the technical knowledge of a sailor. There is no one who knows so well how ships stand in the water; no one has such an understanding of their details: the heavy sailing vessels and the great steamers, which lie in the brown water of the port like mighty monsters, the sailors and the movements of the dock labourers, the dizzy tide of men, the confusion of cabs and drays upon the bridges spanning the arm of the Thames; only Vollon in Paris is to be compared with him as painter of a river-port. [Illustration: R. ANNING BELL. OBERON AND TITANIA WITH THEIR TRAIN.] Apart from him, _Clara Montalba_ specially has painted the London port in delicate water-colours. Yet she is almost more at home in Venice, the Venice of Francesco Guardi, with its magic gleam, its canals, regattas, and palaces, the Oriental and dazzling splendour of San Marco, the austere grace of San Giorgio Maggiore, the spirited and fantastic _décadence_ of Santa Maria della Salute. Elsewhere English water-colour often enters into a fruitless rivalry with oil-painting, but Clara Montalba cleaves to the old form which in other days under Bonington, David Cox, and Turner was the chief glory of the English school. She throws lightly upon paper notes and effects which have struck her, and the memory of which she wishes to retain.