Wilson (1713-1782) is usually regarded as the founder of the English school of landscape. Wilson was thus the contemporary of the author of 'The Seasons,' and he was the first in English

landscape art to paint a snow scene." Probably enough this was but a reflex of the influence of the winter descriptions of Thomson. The art was carried to still higher perfection in Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). In both, however, the scenes depicted are of the ordinary homely or domestic English order-such, in fact, as Cowper limned in verse in the familiar plains, woods, and streams of the Midlands. As yet the grandeur and the picturesqueness of Welsh or Highland mountain, glen, or torrent were wholly unknown to English art. This had, indeed, been touched long before by the Scottish Patrick Nasmyth; and Thomson of Duddingston had loved, worshipped, and delineated it, ere it was even felt by a single English artist. John Constable (1776-1837) followed Gainsborough, and we have subsequently Copley Fielding, Calcott, Collins, Creswick, Stansfield, James Ward, Birket Foster, Linnell, and Lee, and in watercolours the great name of David Cox. But British landscape art was raised to its highest

development, its widest reach, its most perfect accomplishment, in Joseph M. W. Turner (1775-1851) the Shakespeare of landscapepainting.

The Pre-Raphaelite movement, as it was called, began in 1849. If not precisely originated, it was sustained chiefly by the influence of the writings of John Ruskin,-the man of deepest insight into art in modern times—the man capable of embodying this insight in the finest imagery of language, in the purest melody of prose. Millais, Holman Hunt, Dante Rossetti, Ford Maddox Brown, Burne-Jones, are its chief representative names. This movement has profoundly influenced British art in all its forms, and it must continue to do so in the line of truthfulness, face-to-faceness with things, love, brooding, and passion for the spirit of nature. Whatever modifications this form of art may require to undergo in the line of subordination of details, and of the maintenance of unity in its work, we shall always welcome it for its nobler lessons, chief among these the littleness of the individual, with his prepossessions and conceits, before the Power which moves, speaks, teaches in the world of the Senses,-the trans

parent veil and symbol of the spiritual, which is unseen, but not unknown.

And

The true cannot be precisely identified either with what is moral or what is beautiful; and current modes of speech, which make those expressions convertible, arise from, and conduce to, confusion of thought. But truth always means a harmonya harmony, it may be, between what we think or represent the world of fact to be, and that world as it is to our apprehension and generalisation; or truth may be the harmony in the course of our thinking— the harmony of probable and necessary connection in what we conceive about reality. this element of harmony is common to the moral and the beautiful. The former lies in the correspondence of our motive and action with the law of duty-the grand ideals of righteousness, purity, and holiness. The beautiful in the outward world lies in the complete self-sufficing harmony of the object or scene with its own end or ideal with itself, the harmony of part with part, the consent to the whole, the single, definite, unified effect which results from a spontaneous confluence of many

elements in one. This is an immanent harmony which appeals to the cultured eye and to the cultured races of mankind. The essence of the true, the beautiful, the good, is the element of pure harmony. Hence it is that the soul which is attuned to the beautiful, and is in ready response to its various forms, recognises and feels it in this familiar world of ours, has a sense of power which purifies and refines, which awes and subdues with reverence, brings under obedience rebellious impulses, and is a defence against evil and chaotic thoughts, and the best preparative for sympathy with the highest intellectual effort and the purest moral and spiritual life. The true lover of nature is above low and earthly impulses; he is at least in the vestibule of the Temple, and not far from the kingdom of God.

INDEX.