the only existing
expression of precisely the characters which were wanting to old art, of
that feeling which results from the influence among the noble lines of
architecture, of the rent and the rust, the fissure, the lichen, and the
weed, and from the writing upon the pages of ancient walls of the
confused hieroglyphics of human history. I suppose, from the deserved
popularity of the artist, that the strange pleasure which I find myself
in the deciphering of these is common to many; the feeling has been
rashly and thoughtlessly contemned as mere love of the picturesque;
there is, as I have above shown, a deeper moral in it, and we owe much,
I am not prepared to say how much, to the artist by whom pre-eminently
it has been excited. For, numerous as have been his imitators, extended
as his influence, and simple as his means and manner, there has yet
appeared nothing at all to equal him; there is _no_ stone drawing, _no_
vitality of architecture like Prout's. I say not this rashly, I have
Mackenzie in my eye and many other capital imitators; and I have
carefully reviewed the Architectural work of the Academicians, often
most accurate and elaborate. I repeat, there is nothing but the work of
Prout which is true, living, or right in its general impression, and
nothing, therefore, so inexhaustibly agreeable. Faults he has, manifold,
easily detected, and much declaimed against by second-rate artists; but
his excellence no one has ever touched, and his lithographic work,
(Sketches in Flanders and Germany,) which was, I believe, the first of
the kind, still remains the most valuable of all, numerous and elaborate
as its various successors have been. The second series (in Italy and
Switzerland) was of less value, the drawings seemed more laborious, and
had less of the life of the original sketches, being also for the most
part of subjects less adapted for the development of the artist's
peculiar powers; but both are fine, and the Brussels, Louvain, Cologne,
and Nuremberg, subjects of the one, together with the Tours, Amboise,
Geneva, and Sion of the other, exhibit substantial qualities of stone
and wood drawing, together with an ideal appreciation of the present
active vital being of the cities, such as nothing else has ever
approached. Their value is much increased by the circumstance of their
being drawn by the artist's own hand upon the stone, and by the
consequent manly recklessness of subordinate parts, (in works of this
k