The figure of the seaman with his white beard has a strong, sinewy life, and the broad daylight streams through the room, filled with charts and atlases. The sea and clear, bright sky gleam through the open window. It is a powerful and moving picture, one of those modern creations in which the ideas of the nineteenth century are concentrated with simplicity and a renunciation of all hollow emphasis. [Illustration: PHILLIP. SPANISH SISTERS.] A few pictures of modern life which have nothing in common with the older _genre_ painting may even be found among the works of the devotionalist Holman Hunt. "Awakened Conscience," according to the explanation of the painter, tells the story of a young woman seduced by a cruel and light-minded man, and kept in a luxurious little country-house. They are together. Seated at the piano he is playing the old melody "Oft in the Stilly Night," and the strains of the song recall to the frail maiden her youth, and the years of purity and innocence. Thus even Hunt has not overcome the moralising tendencies of Hogarth, though his taste is more discreet and delicate. He has struck deeper chords of thought than the English public had heard before. And in particular the painting is not a mere substratum for the story; it has become the principal thing, and the story subsidiary. In another picture, "May Morning on Magdalen Tower," he renounced all deeper purpose altogether, and merely painted a number of Oxford dons and students, who, in accordance with the old custom, usher in the May with a hymn from the college tower. But the most remarkable work of this description has been executed by Madox Brown, the English Menzel, who has not merely reconstructed the environment of past ages with the accuracy of an eye-witness, but has looked upon the drama of modern life as an attentive observer. His first picture, "The Last of England," was executed in the June of 1852, at a time when emigration to America began to take serious proportions. A married couple, humble, middle-class people, are sitting on the deck of a ship. The man, in his thick cloth overcoat, with a soft felt hat on his head, a pale face, and sunken eyes with dark rings underneath, casts one more look upon his native-land, which vanishes in the hazy distance, as he thinks bitterly of lost hopes and vain struggles. But the young wife, in a light-coloured cloak and a pretty round bonnet with wide strings, gazes before her with gentle resignation, from underneath a great umbrella protecting her from the boisterous sea-wind.