In art we have the first English painters and engravers.  Hogarth, who died a few years after the beginning of the reign, was celebrated for the coarse but perfect representations of low life and street scenes; and his series of Election pictures with his “Beer Lane” and “Gin Alley” are valuable for the insight into the history of the times.

The chief portrait painters were Reynolds, Lawrence, and Gainsborough, the last of whom afterwards became noted for his landscapes.  They were followed by Wilkie, whose pictures of “The Rent Day,” “The Reading of the Will,” and many others, tell a story of interest to every one who looks at them.

Last came Turner, who in some respects surpassed all former artists in his power of reproducing scenes in nature.  At the same time, Bewick, whose cuts used to be the delight of every child that read “Aesop’s Fables,” gave a new impulse to wood engraving, while Flaxman rose to be the leading English sculptor, and Wedgwood introduced useful and beautiful articles of pottery.

In common-school education little advance had been made for many generations.  In the country the great mass of the people were nearly as ignorant as they were in the darkest part of the Middle Ages.  Hardly a peasant over forty years of age could be found who could read a verse in the Bible, and not one in ten could write his name.

There were no cheap books or newspapers, and no proper system of public instruction.  The poor seldom left the counties in which they were born.  They knew nothing of what was going on in the world.  Their education was wholly of the practical kind which comes from work and things, not from books and teachers; yet many of them with only these simple helps found out two secrets which the highest culture sometimes misses,—­how to be useful and how to be happy.[1]

[1] See Wordsworth’s poem “Resolution and Independence.”

The ordinary means of travel were still very imperfect.  Stage-coaches had been in use for more than a hundred and fifty years.  They crawled along at the rate of about three miles an hour.  Mail coaches began to run in 1784.  They attained a speed of six miles an hour, and later of ten.  This was considered entirely satisfactory.

The close of George III’s reign marks the beginning of the present age.  It was indicated in many ways, and among others by the declining use of sedan chairs, which had been the fashion for upwards of a century, and by the change in dress.  Gentlemen were leaving off the picturesque costumes of the past,—­the cocked hats, elaborate wigs, silk stockings, ruffles, velvet coats, and swords,—­and gradually putting on the plain democratic garb, sober in cut and color, by which we know them to-day.

567.  Last Days of George III.

George III died (1820) at the age of eighty-two.  During ten years he had been blind, deaf, and crazy, having lost his reason not very long after the jubilee, which celebrated the fiftieth year of his reign (1809).  Once, in a lucid interval, he was found by the Queen singing a hymn and playing an accompaniment on the harpsichord.