he nobility of spirit; while, on the other hand, it is
altogether impossible to foretell on what strange objects the strength
of a great man will sometimes be concentrated, or by what strange
means he will sometimes express himself. So that true criticism of art
never can consist in the mere application of rules; it can be just
only when it is founded on quick sympathy with the innumerable
instincts and changeful efforts of human nature, chastened and guided
by unchanging love of all things that God has created to be beautiful,
and pronounced to be good.

[45] Claude Gelee [1600-82], usually called Claude Lorrain, a French
landscape painter and etcher.

[46] Vasari, in his _Lives of the Painters_, tells how Giotto,
when a student under Cimabue, once painted a fly on the nose of a
figure on which the master was working, the fly being so realistic
that Cimabue on returning to the painting attempted to brush it
away.

[47] Guercino's Hagar in the Brera gallery in Milan.

[48] Gerard Dow [1613-75], a Dutch genre painter; Hobbima [1638-1709],
a Dutch landscape painter; Walpole [1717-97], a famous English
litterateur; Vasari [1511-74], an Italian painter, now considered
full of mannerisms and without originality, mainly famous as author
of _The Lives of the Painters_.

[49] Giotto.

[50] _Purgatorio_, 12. 31.

OF THE NOVELTY OF LANDSCAPE

VOLUME III, CHAPTER II

Having now obtained, I trust, clear ideas, up to a certain point, of
what is generally right and wrong in all art, both in conception and
in workmanship, we have to apply these laws of right to the particular
branch of art which is the subject of our present inquiry, namely,
landscape-painting. Respecting which, after the various meditations
into which we have been led on the high duties and ideals of art, it
may not improbably occur to us first to ask,--whether it be worth
inquiring about at all.

That question, perhaps the reader thinks, should have been asked and
answered before I had written, or he read, two volumes and a half
about it. So I _had_ answered it, in my own mind; but it seems time
now to give the grounds for this answer. If, indeed, the reader has
never suspected that landscape-painting was anything but good, right,
and healthy work, I should be sorry to put any doubt of its being so
into his mind; but if, as seems to me more likely, he, living in this
busy and perhaps somewhat calamitous age, has