eans fit to be put into a picture; we want a word _literatesque_,
'fit to be put into a book.' An artist goes through a hundred
different country scenes, rich with beauties, charms, and merits, but
he does not paint any of them. He leaves them alone; he idles on till
he finds the hundred-and-first--a scene which many observers would not
think much of, but which _he_ knows by virtue of his art will look
well on canvas, and this he paints and preserves. Susceptible
observers, though not artists, feel this quality too; they say of a
scene, 'How picturesque!' meaning by this a quality distinct from that
of beauty, or sublimity, or grandeur--meaning to speak not only of the
scene as it is in itself, but also of its fitness for imitation by
art; meaning not only that it is good, but that its goodness is such
as ought to be transferred to paper; meaning not simply that it
fascinates, but also that its fascination is such as ought to be
copied by man. A fine and insensible instinct has put language to this
subtle use; it expresses an idea without which fine art criticism
could not go on, and it is very natural that the language of pictorial
should be better supplied with words than that of literary criticism,
for the eye was used before the mind, and language embodies primitive
sensuous ideas, long ere it expresses, or need express, abstract and
literary ones.

The reason why a landscape is 'picturesque' is often said to be that
such landscape represents an 'idea'. But this explanation, though in
the minds of some who use it it is near akin to the truth, fails to
explain that truth to those who did not know it before; the Word
'idea,' is so often used in these subjects when people do not know
anything else to say; it represents so often a kind of intellectual
insolvency, when philosophers are at their wits' end, that shrewd
people will never readily on any occasion give it credit for meaning
anything. A wise explainer must, therefore, look out for other words
to convey what he has to say. _Landscapes_, like everything else in
nature, divide themselves as we look at them into a sort of rude
classification. We go down a river, for example, and we see a hundred
landscapes on both sides of it, resembling one another in much, yet
differing in something; with trees here, and a farmhouse there, and
shadows on one side, and a deep pool far on; a collection of
circumstances most familiar in themselves, but making a perpetual
novelty by