cause of right art, and shall be able to illustrate many principles of
landscape painting which are of general application, and have hitherto
been unacknowledged.

For anything like immediate effect on the public mind, I do not hope.
"We mistake men's diseases," says Richard Baxter, "when we think there
needeth nothing to cure them of their errors but the evidence of truth.
Alas! there are many distempers of mind to be removed before they
receive that evidence." Nevertheless, when it is fully laid before them,
my duty will be done. Conviction will follow in due time. I do not
consider myself as in any way addressing, or having to do with, the
ordinary critics of the press. Their writings are not the guide, but the
expression, of public opinion. A writer for a newspaper naturally and
necessarily endeavors to meet, as nearly as he can, the feelings of the
majority of his readers; his bread depends on his doing so. Precluded by
the nature of his occupations from gaining any knowledge of art, he is
sure that he can gain credit for it by expressing the opinions of his
readers. He mocks the picture which the public pass, and bespatters with
praise the canvas which a crowd concealed from him.

Writers like the present critic of Blackwood's Magazine[C] deserve more
respect--the respect due to honest, hopeless, helpless imbecility. There
is something exalted in the innocence of their feeblemindedness: one
cannot suspect them of partiality, for it implies feeling; nor of
prejudice, for it implies some previous acquaintance with their subject.
I do not know that even in this age of charlatanry, I could point to a
more barefaced instance of imposture on the simplicity of the public,
than the insertion of these pieces of criticism in a respectable
periodical. We are not insulted with opinions on music from persons
ignorant of its notes; nor with treatises on philology by persons
unacquainted with the alphabet; but here is page after page of
criticism, which one may read from end to end, looking for something
which the writer knows, and finding nothing. Not his own language, for
he has to look in his dictionary, by his own confession, for a word[D]
occurring in one of the most important chapters of his Bible; not the
commonest traditions of the schools, for he does not know why Poussin
was called "learned;"[E] not the most simple canons of art, for he
prefers Lee to Gainsborough;[F] not the most ordinary facts of nature,
for we find