copies, some of which might pass for the originals. His walls also were covered with pictures, drawings, and prints, of the great landscape and other painters, and he venerated styles in Art that have been venerated by all the best artists, but of which Mr. Ruskin occasionally speaks with that ridicule which he so well knows how to use.

In another page of "Modern Painters," I read that "Unteachableness seems to have been a main feature of his" (Constable's)" character, and there is a corresponding want of veneration in the way he approaches Nature herself." The first of these charges, I think, has been sufficiently answered; and to the second I will oppose a quotation from one of Constable's lectures, and ask if the words are those of a man wanting in veneration of Nature. "The landscape-painter," he says, "must walk in the fields with an humble mind. No arrogant man was ever permitted to see Nature in all her beauty. If I may be allowed to use a very solemn quotation, I would say most emphatically to the student, Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth.'"

"His early education and associations," continues Mr. Ruskin, "were also against him-they induced a morbid preference of subjects of a low order." Constable's education was among farmers and millers, and I should say, therefore, not unfavourable to a painter of pastoral landscape; and whether his subjects are to be ranked as of a low order, or not, is a question of taste. The materials of which his landscapes are chiefly composed are thus enumerated by himself, in his description of " the scenes of his boyhood," which

he was fond of saying "made him a painter." "Gentle declivities, luxuriant meadow flats, sprinkled with flocks and herds, well cultivated uplands, with numerous scattered villages and churches, with farms and picturesque cottages."

Another objection to his Art, that requires notice, is that Mr. Ruskin has "never seen any work of his in which there are any signs of his being able to draw ;" and from this sentence I can only conclude that Mr. Ruskin has either never seen a genuine picture by Constable, and that his impression is derived from the numerous forgeries of his works in circulation, or that he has seen pictures by him, without looking at them, which often happens where we are not interested. Even in those late works in which Constable used the palette-knife to excess, and in which, as was often the case with Turner, his mind was more intent on colour and effect than on form, there are always evidences of his power of accurate drawing; and I may add that his studies of clouds, of trees, of churches, mills, etc., show him to be as perfect a master of drawing as he was of colour and chiaroscuro.

Having mentioned his use of the palette-knife, I should state that he was himself aware he had done so to an excess. In a note to me, he said, "I have laid the palette-knife down, but not until I had cut my own throat with it." The truth is, that the pictures in which he most used this instrument, are those of which there are the greatest number of forgeries. A practised eye will, however, generally detect these, as, in such imitations, one colour is smeared over another so as to have the muddled and filthy look of the rags

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with which a painter cleans his palette; while the dashes of colour from Constable's knife have the look of gems, and the more they are magnified the more brilliant they appear. His "Waterloo Bridge," of all his large pictures the one in which it was most used, seems painted with liquid gold and silver. The palette-knife appears everywhere, the palette nowhere. I must add to these remarks, that as Constable made a sketch of the full size of every large picture he painted, and as these sketches are complete in effect, though not in detail, they are sometimes mistaken for pictures, and a false notion is therefore conveyed of his Art. It is just possible that some of these may have given to Mr. Ruskin an impression of his want of reverence for Nature, though, considered as a means by which to make his pictures more perfect, they prove the reverse.

Mr. Ruskin alludes to the often-repeated saying of Fuseli, and to which Constable himself first gave currency, but Mr. Ruskin shows a very limited acquaintance with Constable's works, when he calls his effects "great-coat weather and nothing more." Nobody has painted with more truth the finest English summer weather,- -as in the "White Horse," the "Stratford Mill," the "Hay Wain," the "Waterloo Bridge," and others of his large pictures; and particularly in a little meadow scene, of matchless beauty, and the "Boat Building," both in the collection of Mr. Sheepshanks, Now none of these pictures have much of what are called warm colours; but they express the warmth of summer so truly that in some of them (the last two especially) I can fancy I see the tremulous

vibration of the heated air near the ground.

Constable never fell into the common mistake by which even Turner appears to have been influenced, namely, that what are called warm colours are essential to convey the idea of warmth in a landscape. The truth is, that red, orange, and yellow, are only seen in the sky at the coolest hours of the day, and brown and yellow tints, in the foliage of England, prevail only in the spring and autumn. But he fearlessly painted mid-summer noon-day heat, with blues, greens, and greys forming the predominant masses. And he succeeded: because his sensibility of eye directed him to the true tones and arrangements in Nature of these colours at the season he most loved to paint, and which he generally indicated by an eldertree in flower.

While speaking of the colour of Nature, I must not omit to notice a mistake painters who theorise rather than observe fall into, when they give a yellow tinge to all objects in noon-day sunshine, inferring that so it must be because the local colour of the sun is yellow. But, in fact, excepting in the morning or evening, white, in sunshine, is only a purer white, and blue receives not the least tint of green; indeed in blue, even when lighted by the warmest setting sun, it is not easy to detect any change.

Having quoted, with dissent, some of Mr. Ruskin's remarks, I must in justice to that gentleman transcribe a passage in which he speaks of the Art of Constable as "thoroughly original, thoroughly honest, free from affectation, manly in manner, frequently successful in cool colour, and realising certain motives of English

scenery with perhaps as much affection as such scenery, unless when regarded through media of feeling derived from higher sources, is calculated to inspire." Constable, in fact, practised more to the letter than any of his contemporaries what Mr. Ruskin insists on, with great spirit, in another page. "Whatever," he says, "is to be truly great and affecting must have on it the stamp of the native land. Not a law this, but a necessity, from the intense hold on their country of the affections of all truly great men. All classicality, all middle-age patent reviving, is utterly vain and absurd; if we are now to do anything great, good, awful, religious, it must be got out of our own little island, railroads and all." To this I heartily subscribe, and I wish also to be understood as fully sensible of the estimate of the high mission of Art which everywhere appears in the pages of a critic from whom I have received much instruction; and though I cannot agree with Mr. Ruskin in all things, I know no modern writer from whom so many maxims, valuable in matters of taste, and often in higher things, may be quoted.

It is but a very small portion of the world's surface that has been cultivated, so to speak, by the landscapepainter, because, indeed, all Art has been confined within a very narrow geographical limit. The few transcripts of scenery that have been brought to Europe from distant lands are from the hands of amateurs or inferior painters, who have been unable to express the truth of atmosphere, the greatest difficulty, as it is the most important of all the requisites of landscape Art, for without it we can.