EW biographical works have deserved so well of the public as Allan Cunningham's celebrated Lives of the most Eminent British Painters. The secret of the success of the "Lives" lies in the fact that they are biographical records, narrated with sprightly vigour and discriminating intelligence; not mere critical dissertations, uninteresting to the uninitiated, subject to the indifference born of maturer judgment. Comparisons seldom really fit, whether made of a man or of a placewhether Reynolds be called the English Michael Angelo, or Edinburgh the modern Athens: but there is at anyrate some justice in the application to Cunningham of the designation, "The Scottish Vasari." In common with much of the famous record of the Italian chronicler, the main interest of the "Lives of British Painters" is concentrated upon personal details: the man is the dominant theme, the work merely incidental. This is as it should be, in a book intended for the general reader. The severity of criticism has condemned much in Vasari's chronicle that the gossiploving Giorgio probably considered irrefutable, but even in

this day of jealous supervision of fact, his biographical records retain much of their old value in matters of detail, while in point of interest they have suffered no material diminution whatever. As yet, and probably for a long time to come, the same may be written of Allan Cunningham. We now know that in some of his judgments he was mistaken, that portions of his chronicle are faultyand, again, as was inevitable, that circumstances of time and change have modified the accuracy of what were, in his day, reliable statements. But in the main we have no pleasanter and more trustworthy "gossip" than the worthy sculptor's assistant, accustomed to "toiling in marble and bronze all day, and at night dipping the pen in biographical ink to earn an honest penny for the bairns' bread." Even at this date-as Mrs. Heaton has pointed out in what is much the best edition of the "Eminent Painters "*"it is curious to find how little our real knowledge has been widened" since Cunningham's death.

It would, of course, have been quite impracticable to have given the whole, or anything like the whole, of the "Lives" in a single volume of The Camelot Classics; so I have selected therefrom (besides the Introductory Chapter on Art and Artists in England up to the Restoration period) the biographies of Hogarth, Richard Wilson, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and William Blake. These five celebrated artists are not only men whose biographies are of necessity full of permanent interest, but are the best representatives of the splendid sunrise of English Art-of the Art of Painting in England. Hogarth, the caricaturist-or rather the pictorial satirist; Wilson,

* Lives of the most Eminent British Painters. By Allan Cunningham. Annotated and continued to the present time by Mrs. Charles Heaton. In 3 vols. (George Bell & Sons.)

the father, or at anyrate one of the chief progenitors of landscape-painting in this country; the courtly Reynolds, first of our great colourists; Gainsborough, taking, with Sir Joshua, place among the highest in rank of the portraitpainters of modern times, and the initiator in "landscape " of unconventional and natural methods versus pseudoclassicism and sterile formality; and William Blake, the visionary poet-painter-equally at home in describing in verse the woes of the little chimney-sweeper, and in delineating with inspired touch "The Ancient of Days "— whom a swiftly-discerning critic of Blake's own time, Charles Lamb, declared to be "one of the most extraordinary persons of the age."

The lives and works of many other deservedly famous men, besides these, were duly set forth by Cunningham. Perhaps, at a future date, the more important of the biographies of those men who have worthily sustained the tradition of English art may be given in this series; but meanwhile the present volume will serve the end in immediate view.

Allan Cunningham himself should have a few words devoted to him. His father and mother were respectable people of the small-farming class: latterly, John Cunningham acted as a factor for some Dumfriesshire lairds, and it was in Nithsdale that Allan, his fourth son, was born, in December 1784. It was in the village of Dalswinton that Allan passed his youth—a period, by his own and other accounts, very happily spent. Common-sense was one of the most marked characteristics of the young stone-mason; and it was this often foolishly abused mental quality that kept him from scorning the trade to which he had been apprenticed, or from brooding over purely fanciful

wrongs, when as a lad he found his intelligence constantly expanding and his interests reaching a higher level than did those of his companions. For it was as a stone-mason that Allan Cunningham first began the battle of life, and it is satisfactory to know that if his intellectual powers had not lifted him into another sphere, he would have made his way in his quondam calling. From his boyhood the ballad-poetry and traditional lore of Nithsdale and Annandale, of the Scottish lowlands generally, always had a peculiar fascination for him. Besides fostering his own poetic powers, this mental pabulum enlarged his sympathies and widened his intellectual horizon: he began to have more and more realisable dreams of "doing something" himself. He indulged in the joys of versifying, as have done many scores of Scottish lads of his own class before and since, but his "effusions "" had enough in them of native inspiration to distinguish them from the experimental voicings which come into ephemeral existence in almost every northcountry village. He was naturally proud when verses by him under the pseudonymous signature "Hidallan" appeared in one of the minor London magazines; but it was not till after the visit to Nithsdale of Robert Cromek, a well-known engraver and a man of some reading and discrimination, that he became enamoured of and acted upon the idea, first suggested by Mr. Cromek, of entering into the same field of collection and research which had in part occupied the labours of Scott and Bishop. Percy. When ultimately, however, "Nithsdale and Galloway Song" saw the light, acute judges were not long in finding out that many of the so-called legendary verses were not survivals at all, but the production of a living poet; and it was not till Professor Wilson, in a