nters_; Wright, _Life of Richard
Wilson_.

[Illustration: FIG. 94.--HOGARTH. SHORTLY AFTER MARRIAGE. NAT. GAL.
LONDON.]

BRITISH PAINTING: It may be premised in a general way, that the
British painters have never possessed the pictorial cast of mind in
the sense that the Italians, the French, or the Dutch have possessed
it. Painting, as a purely pictorial arrangement of line and color, has
been somewhat foreign to their conception. Whether this failure to
appreciate painting as painting is the result of geographical
position, isolation, race temperament, or mental disposition, would be
hard to determine. It is quite certain that from time immemorable the
English people have not been lacking in the appreciation of beauty;
but beauty has appealed to them, not so much through the eye in
painting and sculpture, as through the ear in poetry and literature.
They have been thinkers, reasoners, moralists, rather than observers
and artists in color. Images have been brought to their minds by words
rather than by forms. English poetry has existed since the days of
Arthur and the Round Table, but English painting is of comparatively
modern origin, and it is not wonderful that the original leaning of
the people toward literature and its sentiment should find its way
into pictorial representation. As a result one may say in a very
general way that English painting is more illustrative than creative.
It endeavors to record things that might be more pertinently and
completely told in poetry, romance, or history. The conception of
large art--creative work of the Rubens-Titian type--has not been given
to the English painters, save in exceptional cases. Their success has
been in portraiture and landscape, and this largely by reason of
following the model.

EARLY PAINTING: The earliest decorative art appeared in Ireland. It
was probably first planted there by missionaries from Italy, and it
reached its height in the seventh century. In the ninth and tenth
centuries missal illumination of a Byzantine cast, with local
modifications, began to show. This lasted, in a feeble way, until the
fifteenth century, when work of a Flemish and French nature took its
place. In the Middle Ages there were wall paintings and church
decorations in England, as elsewhere in Europe, but these have now
perished, except some fragments in Kempley Church, Gloucestershire,
and Chaldon Church, Surrey. These are supposed to date back to the
twelfth centur