alled 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 the