A national art now existed in England. Hogarth, who has been called the Father of English Painting, was a man of too much originality to be a mere imitator of foreign artists. He devoted his art to the representation of the follies of his time. As a satirist he was eminent, but his mirth-provoking pictures had a deeper purpose than that of amusing. Lord Orford wrote: "Mirth colored his pictures, but benevolence designed them. He smiled like Socrates, that men might not be offended at his lectures, and might learn to laugh at their own folly." Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough were born and died in the eighteenth century; their famous works were contemporary with the founding of the Royal Academy in 1768, when these artists, together with Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser, were among its original members. It was a fashion in England at this time for women to paint; they principally affected miniature and water-color pictures, but of the many who called themselves artists few merit our attention; they practised but a feeble sort of imitative painting; their works of slight importance cannot now be named, while their lives were usually commonplace and void of incident. Of the few exceptions to this rule I have written in the later pages of this book. * * * * * The suggestion that the nineteenth century cannot yet be judged as to its final effect in many directions has already been made, and of nothing is this more true than of its Art. Of one phase of this period, however, we may speak with confidence. No other century of which we know the history has seen so many changes--such progress, or such energy of purpose so largely rewarded as in the century we are considering. To one who has lived through more than three score years of this period, no fairy tale is more marvellous than the changes in the department of daily life alone. When I recall the time when the only mode of travel was by stage-coach, boat, or private carriage--when the journey from Boston to St. Louis demanded a week longer in time than we now spend in going from Boston to Egypt--when no telegraph existed--when letter postage was twenty-five cents and the postal service extremely primitive--when no house was comfortably warmed and women carried foot-stoves to unheated churches--when candles and oil lamps were the only means of "lighting up," and we went about the streets at night with dim lanterns--when women spun and wove and sewed with their hands only, and all they accomplished was done at the hardest--when in our country a young girl might almost as reasonably attempt to reach the moon as to become an artist--remembering all this it seems as if an army of magicians must incessantly have waved their wands above us, and that human brains and hands could not have invented and put in operation the innumerable changes in our daily life during the last half-century.