ds, and the combined ignorance and dread of more
sublime scenery; of which the mysteries and dangers were enhanced by the
difficulties of traveling at the period. Thus in Walton's "Angler," you
have a meeting of two friends, one a Derbyshire man, the other a lowland
traveler, who is as much alarmed, and uses nearly as many expressions of
astonishment, at having to go down a steep hill and ford a brook, as a
traveler uses now at crossing the glacier of the Col du Geant. I am not
sure whether the difficulties which, until late years, have lain in the
way of peaceful and convenient traveling, ought not to have great weight
assigned to them among the other causes of the temper of the period;
but be that as it may, if you will examine the whole range of its
literature--keeping this point in view--I am well persuaded that you
will be struck most forcibly by the strange deadness to the higher
sources of landscape sublimity which is mingled with the morbid
pastoralism. The love of fresh air and green grass forced itself upon
the animal natures of men; but that of the sublimer features of scenery
had no place in minds whose chief powers had been repressed by the
formalisms of the age. And although in the second-rate writers
continually, and in the first-rate ones occasionally, you find an
affectation of interest in mountains, clouds, and forests, yet whenever
they write from their heart, you will find an utter absence of feeling
respecting anything beyond gardens and grass. Examine, for instance, the
novels of Smollett, Fielding, and Sterne, the comedies of Moliere, and
the writings of Johnson and Addison, and I do not think you will find a
single expression of true delight in sublime nature in any one of them.
Perhaps Sterne's "Sentimental Journey," in its total absence of
sentiment on any subject but humanity, and its entire want of notice of
anything at Geneva, which might not as well have been seen at Coxwold,
is the most striking instance I could give you; and if you compare with
this negation of feeling on one side, the interludes of Moliere, in
which shepherds and shepherdesses are introduced in court dress, you
will have a very accurate conception of the general spirit of the age.

91. It was in such a state of society that the landscape of Claude,
Gaspar Poussin, and Salvator Rosa attained its reputation. It is the
complete expression on canvas of the spirit of the time. Claude embodies
the foolish pastoralism, Salvator