ing
productions of his boyhood. He was besides a painstaking and faithful
student in the youthful years when the foundations of good work must
be laid. Another valuable quality was his artistic discrimination,
that which a certain critic has called "the selective glance that
discerns in a moment what are the lines of character and of life."
Seizing these, he transferred them to his canvas in the decisive
strokes which reproduce not merely the body but the vitality of the
subject.

His dexterity in texture-painting was remarkable. The glossy coat of
the bay mare, the soft long hair of the Newfoundland dog, the polished
surface of metal, were rendered with consummate skill. There are
marvellous tales of the rapidity of his workmanship. In the moment of
inspiration his practised hand made the single telling brush stroke
which produced the desired effect.

With apparently little systematic effort towards orderly composition,
he often felt his way instinctively, as it were, to some admirable
arrangements. He sometimes showed a feeling for pose almost plastic in
quality, as when he painted A Distinguished Member of the Humane
Society and The Sleeping Bloodhound. His sense of the picturesque is
quite marked. He was fond of sparkle, and disposed very cleverly the
points of bright light in his pictures.

Landseer's admirers are wont to regret that he devoted himself to so
limited a range of subjects. The patronage of the rich absorbed much
of his time in unimportant work,--time which might better have been
spent in those works of creative imagination of which he showed
himself capable. His pictures of deer subjects reveal an otherwise
unsuspected power in landscape-painting which with cultivation might
have led him into another field of success. In portrait-painting, too,
his work was admirable, especially in the delineation of children.

It is idle to speculate upon what he might have been had he not been
what he was. Much greater artists than he might well envy him his
unique fame. To exceptional artistic ability he united a sympathetic
imagination which divined some of the most precious secrets of common
life. It was his peculiar glory that he touched the hearts of the
people.

II. ON BOOKS OF REFERENCE.

In the year following Landseer's death (_i.e._, in 1874), a memoir of
the painter was published by F. G. Stephens, made up in part of
material previously issued by the writer on the Early Works of
Landseer. A few