Neither of these virtues is to be found in Fielding's. Its features, though grouped with feeling, are yet scattered and unessential. Any one of them might be altered in many ways without doing harm; there is no proportioned, necessary, unalterable relation among them; no evidence of invention or of careful thought; while on the other hand there is no botanical or geological accuracy, nor any point on which the eye may rest with thorough contentment in its realization.

It seems strange that to an artist of so quick feeling the details of a mountain foreground should not prove irresistibly attractive, and entice him to greater accuracy of study. There is not a fragment of its living rock, nor a tuft of its heathery herbage, that has not adorable manifestations of God's working thereupon. The harmonies of colour among the native lichens are better than Titian's; the interwoven bells of campanula and heather are better than all the arabesques of the Vatican; they need no improvement, arrangement, nor alteration, nothing but love: and every combination of them is different from every other, so that a painter need never repeat himself if he will only be true. Yet all these sources of power have been of late entirely neglected by Fielding. There is evidence through all his foregrounds of their being mere home inventions, and, like all home inventions, they exhibit perpetual resemblances and repetitions, the painter is evidently embarrassed without his rutted road in the middle, and his boggy pool at the side, which pool he has of late painted in hard lines of violent blue ; there is not a stone, even of the nearest and most important, which has its real lichens upon it, or a studied form, or anything more to occupy the mind than certain variations of dark and light browns. The same faults must be found with his present painting of foliage, neither the stems nor leafage being ever studied from nature; and this is the more to be regretted, because in the earlier works of the artist there was much admirable drawing, and even yet his power is occasionally developed in his larger works, as in a Bolton Abbey on canvass, which was-I cannot say, exhibited,— but was in the rooms of the Royal Academy in 18431. I should

1 It appears not to be sufficiently understood by those artists who complain acrimoniously of their position on the Academy walls, that the Academicians have in

have made the preceding remarks with more hesitation and diffidence, but that, from a comparison of works of this kind with the slighter ornaments of the water-colour rooms, it seems evident that the painter is not unaware of the deficiencies of these latter, and concedes something of what he would himself desire to what he has found to be the feeling of a majority of his admirers. This is a dangerous modesty, and especially so in these days when the judgment of the many is palpably as artificial as their feeling is cold. There is much that is instructive and deserving of high praise in § 23. De Wint. the sketches of De Wint. Yet it is to be remembered that even the pursuit of truth, however determined, will have results limited and imperfect when its chief motive is the pride of being true; and I fear that these works testify more accuracy of eye and experience of colour than exercise of thought. Their truth of effect is often purchased at too great an expense by the loss of all beauty of form, and of the higher refinements of colour; deficiencies, however, on which I shall not insist, since the value of the sketches, as far as they go, is great: they have done good service and set good example, and whatever their failings may be, there is evidence in them that the painter has always done what he believed to be right.

their own rooms a right to the line and the best places near it; in their taking this position there is no abuse nor injustice; but the Academicians should remember that with their rights they have their duties, and their duty is to determine among the works of artists not belonging to their body, those which are most likely to advance public knowledge and judgment, and to give these the best places next their own; neither would it detract from their dignity if they occasionally ceded a square even of their own territory, as they did gracefully and rightly, and I am sorry to add, disinterestedly, to the picture of Paul de la Roche in 1844. Now the Academicians know perfectly well that the mass of portrait which encumbers their walls at half height is worse than useless, seriously harmful to the public taste; and it was highly criminal (I use the word advisedly) that the valuable and interesting work of Fielding, of which I have above spoken, should have been placed where it was, above three rows of eye-glasses and waistcoats. A very beautiful work of Harding's was treated, either in the same or the following exhibition, with still greater injustice. Fielding's was merely put out of sight; Harding's where its faults were conspicuous and its virtues lost. It was an Alpine scene, of which the foreground, rocks, and torrents were painted with unrivalled fidelity and precision; the foliage was dexterous, the aërial gradations of the mountains tender and multitudinous, their forms carefully studied and very grand. The blemish of the picture was a buff-coloured tower with a red roof; singularly meagre in detail, and conventionally relieved from a mass of gloom, The picture was placed where nothing but this tower could be seen.

§ 24. Influ

ence of En

graving.

The influence of the masters of whom we have hitherto spoken is confined to those who have access to their actual works, since J. D. Harding. the particular qualities in which they excel are in no wise to be rendered by the engraver. Those of whom we have next to speak are known to the public in a great measure by help of the engraver; and while their influence is thus very far extended, their modes of working are perhaps, in some degree, modified by the habitual reference to the future translation into light and shade; reference which is indeed beneficial in the care it induces respecting the arrangement of the chiaroscuro and the explanation of the forms, but which is harmful, so far as it involves a dependence rather on quantity of picturesque material than on substantial colour or simple treatment, and as it admits of indolent diminution of size and slightness of execution.

We should not be just to the present works of J. D. Harding, unless we took this influence into account. Some years back none of our artists realised more laboriously, or obtained more substantial colour and texture; but partly from the habit of making slight and small drawings for engravers, and partly also, I imagine, from an overstrained seeking after appearances of dexterity in execution, his drawings have of late years become both less solid and less complete: not, however, without attaining certain brilliant qualities in exchange which are very valuable in the treatment of some of the looser portions of subject. Of the extended knowledge and various powers of this painter, frequent instances will be noted in the following pages. Neither, perhaps, are rightly estimated among artists, owing to a certain coldness of sentiment, in his choice of subject, and a continual preference of the picturesque to the impressive; proved perhaps in nothing so distinctly as in the little interest usually attached to his skies, which, if aërial and expressive of space and movement, content him, though destitute of story, power, or character: an exception must be made in favour of the very grand Sunrise on the Swiss Alps, exhibited in 1844, wherein the artist's real power was in some measure displayed, though I am convinced he is still capable of doing far greater things. So also in his foliage he is apt to sacrifice the dignity of his trees to their wildness, and lose the forest in the copse; neither is he at all accurate

enough in his expression of species or realization of near portions. These are deficiencies, be it observed, of sentiment, not of perception, as there are few who equal him in rapidity of seizure of material truth.

Very extensive influence in modern art must be attributed to the § 25. Samuel Prout. Early works of Samuel Prout; and as there are some circumstances painting of belonging to his treatment of architectural subjects which it does architecture, not come within the sphere of the following chapters to examine, I shall endeavour to note the more important of them here.

Let us glance back for a moment to the architectural drawing of earlier times. Before the time of the Bellinis at Venice, and of Ghirlandajo at Florence, I believe there are no examples of anything beyond conventional representation of architecture, often rich, quaint, and full of interest, as Memmi's abstract of the Duomo at Florence at Sta. Maria Novella, but not to be classed with any genuine efforts at representation. It is much to be regretted that the power and custom of introducing well-drawn architecture should have taken place only when architectural taste had been itself corrupted, and that the architecture introduced by Bellini, Ghirlandajo, Francia, and the other patient and powerful workmen of the fifteenth century, is exclusively of the Renaissance styles; while their drawing of it furnishes little that is of much interest to the architectural draughtsman as such, being always governed by a reference to its subordinate position; so that all forceful shadow and play of colour are (most justly) surrendered for quiet and uniform hues of grey, and chiaroscuro of extreme simplicity. Whatever they chose to do they did with consummate grandeur; note especially the chiaroscuro of the square window of Ghirlandajo's, which so much delighted Vasari in Sta. Maria Novella; and the daring management of a piece of the perspective in the Salutation, opposite; where he has painted a flight of stairs, descending in front, though the picture is twelve feet above the eye. And yet this grandeur, in all these men, results rather from the general power obtained in their drawing of the figure, than from any definite knowledge respecting the things introduced in these accessory parts; so that while in some points it is impossible for any painter to equal these accessories, unless he were in all respects as

how deficient.

$ 20. Effects of age upon

buildings, how far desirable.

great as Ghirlandajo or Bellini, in others it is possible for him, with far inferior powers, to attain a representation both more accurate and more interesting.

In order to arrive at the knowledge of these, we must briefly take note of a few of the modes in which architecture itself is agreeable to the mind, especially of the influence upon the character of the building which is to be attributed to the signs of age.

It is evident, first, that if the design of the building be originally bad, the only virtue it can ever possess will be in signs of antiquity. All that in this world enlarges the sphere of affection or imagination is to be reverenced, and all those circumstances enlarge it which strengthen our memory or quicken our conception of the dead. Hence it is no light sin to destroy anything that is old; more especially because, even with the aid of all obtainable records of the past, we, the living, occupy a space of too large importance and interest in our own eyes; we look upon the world too much as our own, too much as if we had possessed it and should possess it for ever, and forget that it is a mere hostelry, of which we occupy the apartments for a time, which others better than we have sojourned in before, who are now where we should desire to be with them. Fortunately for mankind, as some counterbalance to that wretched love of novelty which originates in selfishness, shallowness, and conceit, and which especially characterizes all vulgar minds, there is set in the deeper places of the heart such affection for the signs of age that the eye is delighted even by injuries which are the work of time; not but that there is also real and absolute beauty in the forms and colours so obtained, for which the original lines of the architecture, unless they have been very grand indeed, are well exchanged; so that there is hardly any building so ugly but that it may be made an agreeable object by such appearances. It would not be easy, for instance, to find a less pleasing piece of architecture than the portion of the front of Queen's College, Oxford, which has just been restored; yet I believe that few persons could have looked with total indifference on the mouldering and shattered surface of the oolite limestone, previous to its restoration. If, however, the character of the building consists in minute detail or multitudinous lines, the evil or good effect of