ficult to conceive the circle of their influence widened. There is
not a landscape of recent times in which the treatment of the
architectural features has not been affected, however unconsciously, by
principles which were first developed by Prout. Of those principles the
most original was his familiarization of the sentiment, while he
elevated the subject, of the picturesque. That character had been
sought, before his time, either in solitude or in rusticity; it was
supposed to belong only to the savageness of the desert or the
simplicity of the hamlet; it lurked beneath the brows of rocks and the
eaves of cottages; to seek it in a city would have been deemed an
extravagance, to raise it to the height of a cathedral, an heresy. Prout
did both, and both simultaneously; he found and proved in the busy
shadows and sculptured gables of the Continental street sources of
picturesque delight as rich and as interesting as those which had been
sought amidst the darkness of thickets and the eminence of rocks; and he
contrasted with the familiar circumstances of urban life, the majesty
and the aerial elevation of the most noble architecture, expressing its
details in more splendid accumulation, and with a more patient love than
ever had been reached or manifested before his time by any artist who
introduced such subjects as members of a general composition. He thus
became the interpreter of a great period of the world's history, of that
in which age and neglect had cast the interest of ruin over the noblest
ecclesiastical structures of Europe, and in which there had been born at
their feet a generation other in its feelings and thoughts than that to
which they owed their existence, a generation which understood not their
meaning, and regarded not their beauty, and which yet had a character of
its own, full of vigor, animation, and originality, which rendered the
grotesque association of the circumstances of its ordinary and active
life with the solemn memorialism of the elder building, one which rather
pleased by the strangeness than pained by the violence of its contrast.

148. That generation is passing away, and another dynasty is putting
forth its character and its laws. Care and observance, more mischievous
in their misdirection than indifference or scorn, have in many places
given the mediaeval relics the aspect and associations of a kind of
cabinet preservation, instead of that air of majestic independence, or
patient and s