a few
curls which fall over the shoulders. This was evidently the favorite
coiffure in the year 1786, as the portrait of the Duchess of
Devonshire with her Child, painted in the same year, shows precisely
the same style. Both ladies also wear low-cut bodices with kerchiefs
arranged in the same manner. The finishing touch of Miss Bingham's
costume is the big straw hat worn aslant on the back of the head.

It has been a favorite device of great portrait painters to dress
their sitters in all sorts of fanciful headwear. Rembrandt's portraits
show an endless variety of caps, turbans, and hats. Rubens was fond of
painting broad-brimmed hats shading the face, one of his celebrated
pictures being a study of this kind called Le Chapeau de Paille (The
Straw Hat).

Now Reynolds was to some extent an imitator of these two men, and it
may be he learned something from their pictures about hats. However
that may be, we see how the hat here proves very effective in bringing
the head into harmonious relation with the whole composition. The brim
describes a diagonal line parallel with the line made by the kerchief
over the left shoulder. The kerchief on the right shoulder falls in a
line parallel with the left arm.

A composition based on short diagonal lines like these is as different
as possible in character from one of long flowing curves like Hope.
Each one is appropriate to its own subject.

XIV

THE STRAWBERRY GIRL

Village life in England before the time of railroads had a picturesque
charm which it has since lost except in remote districts. We learn
something about it in Miss Mitford's sketches of "Our Village" and in
Miss Edgeworth's "Tales." From such books it is delightful to
reconstruct in imagination some of these rural scenes; the wide
meadows where the cowslips grow, the brooks running beneath the
hawthorns and alders, the lanes winding between hedgerows, the green
common where the cricketers play, the low cottages covered to the roof
with vines, and the trim gardens gay with pinks and larkspur. These
villages are connected with the outside world only by the postcart and
chapman. Here modest little girls like Miss Mitford's Hannah and Miss
Edgeworth's Simple Susan move about their daily tasks and run on their
errands of mercy.

Now Sir Joshua Reynolds was a native of Devonshire, a beautiful
English district which all born Devons love with peculiar devotion, as
we may see from Charles Kingsley's descripti