o time nor power left for playing
tricks on the road to it; he catches at the easiest and best means he
can get; it is possible that such means may be singular, and then it
will be said that his _style_ is strange; but it is not a style at all,
it is the saying of a particular thing in the only way in which it
possibly can be said. Thus the reed pen outline and peculiar touch of
Prout, which are frequently considered as mere manner, are in fact the
only means of expressing the crumbling character of stone which the
artist loves and desires. That character never has been expressed except
by him, nor will it ever be expressed except by his means. And it is of
the greatest importance to distinguish this kind of necessary and
virtuous manner from the conventional manners very frequent in
derivative schools, and always utterly to be contemned, wherein an
artist, desiring nothing and feeling nothing, executes everything in his
own particular mode, and teaches emulous scholars how to do with
difficulty what might have been done with ease. It is true that there
are sometimes instances in which great masters have employed different
means of getting at the same end, but in these cases their choice has
been always of those which to them appeared the shortest and most
complete; their practice has never been prescribed by affectation or
continued from habit, except so far as must be expected from such
weakness as is common to all men; from hands that necessarily do most
readily what they are most accustomed to do, and minds always liable to
prescribe to the hands that which they can do most readily.

The recollection of this will keep us from being offended with the loose
and blotted handling of David Cox. There is no other means by which his
object could be attained. The looseness, coolness, and moisture of his
herbage; the rustling crumpled freshness of his broad-leaved weeds; the
play of pleasant light across his deep heathered moor or plashing sand;
the melting of fragments of white mist into the dropping blue above; all
this has not been fully recorded except by him, and what there is of
accidental in his mode of reaching it, answers gracefully to the
accidental part of nature herself. Yet he is capable of more than this,
and if he suffers himself uniformly to paint beneath his capability,
that which began in feeling must necessarily end in manner. He paints
too many small pictures, and perhaps has of late permitted his peculiar