terfield. What he says of the utility of drawing, might indeed have been said a hundred ways;-so that I may pass it over: but what he says of landscape-painting, which is the only part of this subject in which I am about to intermeddle, is deserving of being said in his own words, which, not being Greek, may be safely quoted. "Et veramente chi non estima quest' arte, parmi che molto sia dalla ragione alieno: che la machina del mondo che noi veggiamo, con l'ampio cielo di chiare stelle tanto splendido; et nel mezzo la terra da i mari cinta, di monti, valli, et fiumi variata, et di diversi alberi et vaghi fiori et di herbe ornata; dir si puo che una nobile et gran pittura sia per man de la natura et di Dio composta. La qual chi puo imitare, parmi esser di gran laude degno."

With respect to the utility of this art, two strokes of a pencil will often tell a tale of unknown length, and there are many tales which cannot be told at all for want of it.

Sir Joseph Banks ploughs the depths of old ocean for years, cutting through the bodies and souls of the myriad tribes by which it is inhabited, in vain. They will neither pickle nor preserve; the wealthy Baronet cannot draw them, and he and the world continue as wise as ever. Mr. Humboldt sweats himself to a thread on the Oroonoko, and freezes his beard to wire on the Andes; and lo! when he arrives at Jamaica, all his collections are in the maws of termites, and dermestes, and centipedes all for want of a few scraps of paper and a halfpennyworth of Indian ink properly distributed on them.

Our Parks (worthy man), and our Mackenzies, and Hearnes, and Brownes, and uncounted thousands more, run all over the world to disennuy themselves and bring home journals; and when the journals have generated a quarto, or half-a-dozen quartos, nine-tenths, and the better part too, of the story is all to seek. There are beasts and buildings, and men and plants, and serpents and gorgons, and chimeras and countries of all kinds, architecture that we are dying to understand, monuments from the time of Nimrod, mountains whose heads do reach the skies; and what is it all when told?-nothing...

It is just the same at home. The same cowardly and indolent spirit has served to make taste a trade: and thus, in this commercial country of ours, we proceed on the principle of the division of labour; as if no one man ought to do more than one thing, as if he who twists the head of a pin is not to cut its carcase into lengths; going to the proper shops, to buy a guinea's-worth of taste from one artist, and a thousand pounds'-worth from another. Thus the gentleman who has more money than wit, applies to him who has more wit than money, and who sets up a shop where he retails it to all those who are fools enough to buy. Hence the gardener, who has acquired a fortune of some kind, by the usual means, sets up for a Capability-man; and those who, like the general mob, are led by high pretensions, flock to him, laying open their lands and their purses, till the one is emptied, and the other marred; and thus doing, by a deputy, what they ought to have been far better capable of doing themselves, while also depriving themselves of what might have been a source of pleasure, as well as an employment. It is the same in architecture: as if taste could only be acquired by those who must live by it; as if he who has, or might have, the

most general education and the most varied acquirements, must necessarily be inferior to all those who choose to assert their superiority, and to keep a shop for its distribution.

It will surprise those who are not accustomed to analyze and study their impressions and recollections, to find how little of accuracy their ideas of visible objects really possess ; not only in remembrance, but even at the moment of the impression. But it does not surprise a painter to find that, even at the distance of years, he can recall a subject which he once intended to paint, or that he can give, at any time, the true character of objects once impressed on his mind. As far as painting is merely an imitative art, this is its essence-a correct notion of visible forms and colours; and he who cannot paint, differs far more from the artist in his eye for present observation, or in his memory for past ones, than he does in mere dexterity of hand. In truth, ordinary observers have but vague notions of forms, whatever they may imagine; and the test is, that they cannot draw them. When the eye has acquired its knowledge, the hand will not be long in learning to record it.

Were this art more generally diffused, the relations of travellers would differ far less from each other than they now do, even on ordi. nary matters; and would convey far more accurate, as well as more consistent ideas. It is the fashion, however, for every one to imagine that he can describe pictures and buildings; though ignorant of painting and architecture, and unable to mark on paper the outline of a column or the angle of a pediment. The public at large has no resource in these cases, but to submit with sad civility, or to believe and be deceived. But he who knows what art is, will pay the same attention to these tales as he does to the criticisms which he daily hears in picture-galleries; where a knowledge of all that belongs to art is supposed to be innate or inherent in those who do not possess one of its principles; but whose claims to knowledge consist in wealth to purchase, or in birth to dictate. Sir Joshua shifts his trumpet and takes snuff.

But I must return from utility to pleasure; which, nine times out of ten, is the better thing of the two. And here, also, I must limit myself to landscape; lest, if I went deeper into the subject, I should weary the patience of the reader. If the pleasures derived from any art-from painting, architecture, poetry, or music-are greatest to those who are educated-a truth which will only be denied on the general ground of the felicity of ignorance-then we ought to cultivate the art of drawing, to enable us to derive from natural scenery all the pleasures which it is capable of affording. Nature, as Castiglione says, is a great picture painted by the hand of the Creator: it is an endless collection of pictures, offering inexhaustible sources of pleasure and study and criticism; containing not only all that art ever executed, all its principles and all its details, but infinitely more than it can ever attain. If it requires deep and long study to understand art, if none can truly judge of it but he whose band can follow his eye, or whose eye at least has acquired that knowledge which makes the painter; it cannot require less to understand nature. Nor must it be said that, in the study of art, any more than in that of nature, taste

may be independent of this accuracy of knowledge, or that a perfect perception of beauty can exist without it. As well might it be said that a perfect perception of the beauties of poetry or music may exist without critical knowledge. I do not mean technical criticism; but a distinct comprehension of all the sources of beauty, of their nature and causes.

Applying this rule to the simple enjoyment of natural scenery, as the object now before us, it is only the practical painter, he who is at the same time every thing that a painter ought to be, who can derive from landscape all the pleasures which it is calculated to yield. And the ignorant or uncultivated spectator will receive less enjoyment from it than he who, though not an artist, has studied the art of painting, or who, from his practical knowledge of drawing, has learnt to observe and compare truly, to attend to a thousand minute circumstances in colour, form, shadow, contrast, and so forth, which escape ordinary spectators.

Among artists, also, each has his particular bent each observes something which another will, overlook. While the eye of Claude comprehends the whole extent of a rich or fertile country, dressed up in all the luxuriance of art and nature, adorned with mountains and rivers, and trees and temples, and teeming with life; that of Cuyp will content itself with a sunny bank and a group of cattle, as that of Berghem too often does with a few ruined walls: while the degenerate taste of others is satisfied, where Nature spreads all her beauties around, to grovel among hay-fields and pig-sties, to study and detail the anatomy of a wooden bridge or a muddy wharf.

The critic in art finds other sources of enjoyment in landscape, which are unknown, even to those whose acquired taste may, short of this information, stand at a high point in the scale. In the accidents of light and shade, he perceives beauties which those do not know how to feel or value who are unaware of their power in giving force and attraction to paintings. In the multiplicity and harmony of direct, reflected, and half lights, under a thousand tones for which there are no terms, he sees charms which are only sensible to a highly cultivated and somewhat technical eye. It is only such an eye that can truly feel the beauty of colouring-that is sensible to its innumerable modifications, to all the hidden links by which it is connected, and to all the harmony which results from arrangement and contrast.

The mere art of omission in contemplating landscape is a most material one; nor is it to be acquired without study and technical knowledge. Nature is rarely, indeed, faultless; more commonly, she is full of faults to counteract her beauties. And as the deformities are commonly the most obvious, invariably so to the uneducated, so these turn with neglect or aversion from scenes whence the educated and the critic, without difficulty, extract beauties. The latter may, if he practises drawing, fill his portfolio with subjects from countries where others would not make a single sketch: or, if that is not his object, he still travels in the midst of beautiful scenes where his companions, if he has any, are dull and uninterested; with the additional satisfaction, if he thinks it such, that results from his consciousness of superiority, and with the much more legitimate one, that he is enjoying the reward of his own exertions and studies.

This is the education which not only teaches us how to enjoy Nature, but which absolutely creates the very scenes for our enjoyment. This, too, is the education which is attainable by all. But the artist who is versed in the works of his predecessors, finds still farther sources of pleasure in comparison, as the critic does in comparing the several styles of authors. Thus he learns to look at Nature alternately with the eye of Poussin, or Claude, or Berghem, or Rembrandt, or Waterlo; detecting, by their aid, beauties that would otherwise have escaped him, and multiplying to an incalculable degree the sources of his enjoyment as well as of his studies.

It is of the character of one artist, perhaps, to dwell on all that is placid and rich in composition and colour; another delights in the foaming torrent, the ravine, and the precipice; the simplicity of rural nature exclusively attracts a third; and others yet, select for imitation the edifices of art, the depths of the forest, the ocean decked with smiles or raging with fury, or the merest elements of landscape-the broken bank, the scathed tree, or the plants that deck the foreground. Viewing with the eyes of the whole, stored with the ideas which he has accumulated from the study of their works, his attention is alive and his senses open to every thing; and not a beauty can pass before him but he is prepared to see it and to enjoy it.

I have supposed, at the outset of this little essay, that all the ordinary and mechanical part of drawing-that which consists in copying from works of art, from drawings, or even from nature, may be attained by all persons of moderate and ordinary talents, if they will but believe that it is attainable, and will make use of that moderate portion of exertion or industry which they bestow on other things. But, having still before me landscape as the most attainable and amusing branch of this art, it is necessary, if we would form the mind of the young artist, or even our own as mere idlers in art, so as to extract from Nature all the beauties she contains, and analyse and detect her inexhaustible stores, that we should become familiar with the works of all those painters who have excelled in their several ways, neglecting no style, but learning to appropriate to each his particular class of scenery, and to seek for these in Nature. Fortified with this knowledge, we can look at the objects she presents; and glancing over our treasured ideas, if we find not what Claude would have found, we may yet discover what would have formed the study of Both, or Suaneveldt, or Vanderneer; and thus multiply our enjoyments to an incalculable degree, by extracting something of form, or colour, or composition, from what is before us; by personifying the infinite variety of tastes that have preceded us, and for all of which there is enjoyment, when we choose to seek it, and know where it is to be sought.

In every thing the art of seeing is really an art, and an art that must be learnt. It must be learnt for the plainest of reasons. It is not a simple effort, nor the result of simple sensations; it is the consequence of short and quick, but complicated trains of reasoning, and is necessarily connected with, and dependent on, a thousand associations, without which it were the same if the objects were exhibited to the eyes of a child or a dromedary.

It is natural for us to imagine that we must know well and thoroughly that with which we are familiar, that we cannot fail to understand what we see every day. Thus the vulgar, which imagines itself a judge of music, forgets also that there may be more in this art than meets its own ear, and refuses to yield its judgment to the learned. As little can it comprehend the natural beauties which surround it; and thus also it disbelieves, as it dislikes, like Mungo in the Padlock, what it does not understand. Yet this taste is of slow growth, and is among the last to appear. If we doubt that, to be attained in perfection, it requires much and various study, much practice, and great delicacy of feeling, a warm and creative imagination, and many collateral acquisitions, we have only to examine our own progress, to compare our present state with any previous one, and, in admitting that there may be a much longer path before us than the one we have left behind, learn to be modest.

As to the public at large, we have almost ourselves witnessed the rise, the origin, of the present taste, such as it is, for the beauties of Nature for landscape scenery. If it does not yet possess much, it is still a far other public than it was forty, nay, thirty years ago. And if I shall succeed in convincing your readers, whether male or female, that it may be yet a far different public from what it is now, I expect that Mr. Newman and Mr. Ackermann, and the remainder of this ingenious tribe, will join in a handsome subscription for a piece of plate, something better than the silver palette of the Society of Arts, to be presented through your hands, Mr. Editor, to the X. Y. Z. gentleman who has written this paper, and thus brought custom to their shops. I beg to assure you that I am neither a colourman, nor a paper-maker, nor even a drawing-master; and that the Ladies and Gentlemen, who are ambitious of learning more than they already know, need not ' apply as above." I am, I assure you, a most disinterested, or uninterested, personage; and am only ambitious to add to the pleasures and accomplishments of the darling sex from which all our own pleasures and accomplishments arise, and to which they all tend.

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But, as I am in danger of travelling out of the record, I shall only add, before I take my leave, that the great increase of domestic travelling, while it appears to originate in a taste for the beauties of Nature, is that which chiefly tends to generate it. The people begin by imagining that it sees, and admires, and understands; and it ends in doing what it had but fancied before-in seeing, and admiring, and understanding. If a taste for the art of design is also yet low in Britain, there is a certain moderate portion of it which is widely diffused, as is a species of rambling and superficial literature: and all this aids the cause, as it is equally an earnest of future improvement. Let us all strive for more; and, to attain it, begin by convincing ourselves of our ignorance. There are few pleasures better worth the pursuit, for there are few that cost less and produce less pain-few that yield more refined and delicate satisfaction, either in the present enjoyment or the future recollection. The contemplation of Nature is a perpetual and a cheap gratification; improving the heart while it cultivates the mind, and abstracting us from the view, as it helps to guard us against the intrusion, of those cares, against which it requires all our watchfulness and attention to shut the door.