with those
adopted by the Byzantine mosaicist to express the nature of these trees.

Sec. XI. The reader is doubtless aware that the olive is one of the most
characteristic and beautiful features of all Southern scenery. On the
slopes of the northern Apennines, olives are the usual forest timber;
the whole of the Val d'Arno is wooded with them, every one of its
gardens is filled with them, and they grow in orchard-like ranks out of
its fields of maize, or corn, or vine; so that it is physically
impossible, in most parts of the neighborhood of Florence, Pistoja,
Lucca, or Pisa, to choose any site of landscape which shall not owe its
leading character to the foliage of these trees. What the elm and oak
are to England, the olive is to Italy; nay, more than this, its presence
is so constant, that, in the case of at least four fifths of the
drawings made by any artist in North Italy, he must have been somewhat
impeded by branches of olive coming between him and the landscape. Its
classical associations double its importance in Greece; and in the Holy
Land the remembrances connected with it are of course more touching than
can ever belong to any other tree of the field. Now, for many years
back, at least one third out of all the landscapes painted by English
artists have been chosen from Italian scenery; sketches in Greece and in
the Holy Land have become as common as sketches on Hampstead Heath; our
galleries also are full of sacred subjects, in which, if any background
be introduced at all, the foliage of the olive ought to have been a
prominent feature.

And here I challenge the untravelled English reader to tell me what an
olive-tree is like?

Sec. XII. I know he cannot answer my challenge. He has no more idea of an
olive-tree than if olives grew only in the fixed stars. Let him meditate
a little on this one fact, and consider its strangeness, and what a
wilful and constant closing of the eyes to the most important truths it
indicates on the part of the modern artist. Observe, a want of
perception, not of science. I do not want painters to tell me any
scientific facts about olive-trees. But it had been well for them to
have felt and seen the olive-tree; to have loved it for Christ's sake,
partly also for the helmed Wisdom's sake which was to the heathen in
some sort as that nobler Wisdom which stood at God's right hand, when He
founded the earth and established the heavens. To have loved it, even to
the hoary dimness o