elation among them; no evidence of invention or
of careful thought, while on the other hand there is no botanical or
geological accuracy, nor any point on which the eye may rest with
thorough contentment in its realization.

It seems strange that to an artist of so quick feeling the details of a
mountain foreground should not prove irresistibly attractive, and entice
him to greater accuracy of study. There is not a fragment of its living
rock, nor a tuft of its heathery herbage, that has not adorable
manifestations of God's working thereupon. The harmonies of color among
the native lichens are better than Titian's; the interwoven bells of
campanula and heather are better than all the arabesques of the Vatican;
they need no improvement, arrangement, nor alteration, nothing but love,
and every combination of them is different from every other, so that a
painter need never repeat himself if he will only be true; yet all these
sources of power have been of late entirely neglected by Fielding; there
is evidence through all his foregrounds of their being mere home
inventions, and like all home inventions they exhibit perpetual
resemblances and repetitions; the painter is evidently embarrassed
without his rutted road in the middle, and his boggy pool at the side,
which pool he has of late painted in hard lines of violent blue: there
is not a stone, even of the nearest and most important, which has its
real lichens upon it, or a studied form or anything more to occupy the
mind than certain variations of dark and light browns. The same faults
must be found with his present painting of foliage, neither the stems
nor leafage being ever studied from nature; and this is the more to be
regretted, because in the earlier works of the artist there was much
admirable drawing, and even yet his power is occasionally developed in
his larger works, as in a Bolton Abbey on canvas, which was,--I cannot
say, exhibited,--but was in the rooms of the Royal Academy in 1843.[9] I
should have made the preceding remarks with more hesitation and
diffidence, but that, from a comparison of works of this kind with the
slighter ornaments of the water-color rooms, it seems evident that the
painter is not unaware of the deficiencies of these latter, and concedes
something of what he would himself desire to what he has found to be the
feeling of a majority of his admirers. This is a dangerous modesty, and
especially so in these days when the judgment of the ma