Related article: of whose private life and charac- ter singularly little has hitherto been known. According to the generally accurate " Dictionary of National Biography," the fa- mous painter of hunting scenes was originally employed in the stables of the Duke of Beaufort ; but this would seem to be an error. The Badminton records make no mention of Aiken's Buy Terazosin Hydrochloride name, and Sir Walter has suc- ceeded in tracing a grandson and a granddaughter of the artist, from whom he has procured some account of the family in general, 242 baily's magazine. [OCTOBBl and of Henry in particular. Henry's father appears to have been a Dane who fled to this country about 1772 foe political reasons, and settled in Suffolk, changing his name, Se£frien, to Aiken ; the latter being the name of a small village near Aarhus. The book owes much of its value to the author's inclusion of artists whose names are unknown to the great majority, though their works should have earned for them honoured remembrance. The pictures of such men as Henry Aiken, Abraham Cooper, John Herring, Sir £. Landseer, George Stubbs and James Ward are familiar to all; but it has been no man's business until now to render justice to painters whose works are of infinite value as con- tributions to sporting history. John E. Fernley, for example, is ut little known outside hunting circles, and it is a question whether his work receives there the meed of appreciation due to one who has done so much to show us Leicestershire as it was in the earlier part of the century. Charles Hancock, whose career was contemporary with that of J. F. Herring, was a prolific workman whose portraits of fa- mous horses deserve to be more widely known ; that knowledge of them is not more general is pro- bably due to the fact that he was overshadowed by his rival Herring, who painted portraits of the same giants of the Turf. Of the private life of painters who lived and died a century or more ago there is necessarily little to tell ; the career of a com- paratively obscure artist can often be traced only, and in fragmen- tary fashion, through his pictures, and through occasional references in contemporary publications. Sir Walter Gilbey has made the most of material which must often have been hard to find, and thanks to his industry, we have now a book which will assuredly take its place at once as a work of reference. Even as he has unearthed facts relating to the lives of obscure or forgotten artists, he has told much that has never before been published con- cerning the lives of famous pain- ters. Of Sir Edwin Landseer he observes that *'the excellent article in vol. xxii. of the * Dic- tionary of National Biography ' leaves little to be said"; but nevertheless he has added much to our knowledge of the man. Sir Walter's twenty-five pages on Landseer leave a singularly clear and vivid impression of the great painter's private life and charac- ter : the reader feels that he knows the man as intimately as he knows the pictures made familiar by the engraver. A valuable and important fea- ture of the book is the list of works which follows each bio- graphy. These in some cases serve to show us how much richer are the private collections of English noblemen and others in the works of old sporting artists than are the national collections. Thus neither in the National Gal- lery or at South Kensington is. there exhibited a single specimen of the work of John Wootton, the first great English animal painter who flourished during the earlier half of the eighteenth century;, while the Duke of Portland's col- lection at Welbeck Abbey boasts, no fewer than fourteen paintings by this artist, and several important works hang on the walls of the Duke of Beaufort at Badminton; in all probability the most re- presentative collection of his- works in England. The cata- logues of the Royal Academy, since its beginning in 1768, of other public exhibitions and loan. I900.J A GUN-ROOM CAUSBRIE. 243 collections, the wealth of engrav- ings contained in the old Snorting Magazine and its contemporaries, and other sources of information have been laid under contribu- tion for these lists ; and if, as the author warns us, they cannot lay claim to completeness, they at all events give an excellent idea of the scope and nature of each painter's labours. The majority of these fifty biographies appeared in the pages of this and other sporting maga- zines ; but in numerous cases these have been remodelled and supplemented with fresh facts. Our readers will also recognise most of the engravings. A copious index to the i>aintings, engravings, sculptures, &c., men- tioned in the book renders the contents of this mine of informa- tion readily accessible. A Gun-Room Causerie. FAST GUNS AND AUTOMATIC MECHANISMS. \ Of all qualities a modem shot- gun should possess none is so advantageous to first-class marks- manship as correct balance, which alone allows of the speediest mani- pulation of the gun. But if the advantage derived from ability to aim quickly is not to be lost, it is essential that the gun be fast. A fast gun is one in which the firing mechanism acts in the least pos- sible time. With a fast gun the striker hits the cap of the car- tridge within one two-hundredth of a second from the instant the trigger is pulled. A slow gun will require more than that ; either a small fraction of a second longer, or such dilatory ignition as the old flint-lock guns gave. In the old days, when the merits of per- cussion-cap guns were contrasted with the defects of the flint-lock, much more was made of speed in