ing is truly
drawn but that; all else is vague, slight, imperfect; got with as
little pains as possible. You examine your closest foreground, and
find no leaves; your largest oak, and find no acorns; your human
figure, and find a spot of red paint instead of a face; and in all
this, again and again, the Aristophanic words come true, and the
clouds seem to be "great goddesses to idle men."

The next thing that will strike us, after this love of clouds, is the
love of liberty. Whereas the mediaeval was always shutting himself into
castles, and behind fosses, and drawing brickwork neatly, and beds of
flowers primly, our painters delight in getting to the open fields and
moors; abhor all hedges and moats; never paint anything but free-growing
trees, and rivers gliding "at their own sweet will"; eschew formality
down to the smallest detail; break and displace the brickwork which
the mediaeval would have carefully cemented; leave unpruned the
thickets he would have delicately trimmed; and, carrying the love of
liberty even to license, and the love of wildness even to ruin, take
pleasure at last in every aspect of age and desolation which emancipates
the objects of nature from the government of men;--on the castle wall
displacing its tapestry with ivy, and spreading, through the garden,
the bramble for the rose.

Connected with this love of liberty we find a singular manifestation
of love of mountains, and see our painters traversing the wildest
places of the globe in order to obtain subjects with craggy foregrounds
and purple distances. Some few of them remain content with pollards
and flat land; but these are always men of third-rate order; and the
leading masters, while they do not reject the beauty of the low
grounds, reserve their highest powers to paint Alpine peaks or Italian
promontories. And it is eminently noticeable, also, that this pleasure
in the mountains is never mingled with fear, or tempered by a spirit
of meditation, as with the mediaeval; but it is always free and
fearless, brightly exhilarating, and wholly unreflective; so that the
painter feels that his mountain foreground may be more consistently
animated by a sportsman than a hermit; and our modern society in
general goes to the mountains, not to fast, but to feast, and leaves
their glaciers covered with chicken-bones and egg-shells.

Connected with this want of any sense of solemnity in mountain
scenery, is a general profanity of temper in regarding