what undreamt-of loveliness might he not bring back to us, if
he would lose himself for a summer in Highland foregrounds; if he would
paint the heather as it grows, and the foxglove and the harebell as they
nestle in the clefts of the rocks, and the mosses and bright lichens of
the rocks themselves. And then, cross to the Jura, and bring back a
piece of Jura pasture in spring; with the gentians in their earliest
blue, and a soldanelle beside the fading snow! And return again, and
paint a gray wall of alpine crag, with budding roses crowning it like a
wreath of rubies. That is what he was meant to do in this world; not to
paint bouquets in china vases.

191. I have in various other places expressed my sincere respect for the
works of Samuel Prout: his shortness of sight has necessarily prevented
their possessing delicacy of finish or fullness of minor detail; but I
think that those of no other living artist furnish an example so
striking of innate and special instinct, sent to do a particular work at
the exact and only period when it was possible. At the instant when
peace had been established all over Europe, but when neither national
character nor national architecture had as yet been seriously changed by
promiscuous intercourse or modern "improvement"; when, however, nearly
every ancient and beautiful building had been long left in a state of
comparative neglect, so that its aspect of partial ruinousness, and of
separation from recent active life, gave to every edifice a peculiar
interest--half sorrowful, half sublime;--at that moment Prout was
trained among the rough rocks and simple cottages of Cornwall, until his
eye was accustomed to follow with delight the rents and breaks, and
irregularities which, to another man, would have been offensive; and
then, gifted with infinite readiness in composition, but also with
infinite affection for the kind of subjects he had to portray, he was
sent to preserve, in an almost innumerable series of drawings, _every
one made on the spot_, the aspect borne, at the beginning of the
nineteenth century, by cities which, in a few years more, re-kindled
wars, or unexpected prosperities, were to ravage, or renovate, into
nothingness.[33]

192. It seems strange to pass from Prout to John Lewis; but there is
this fellowship between them, that both seem to have been intended to
appreciate the characters of foreign countries more than of their own,
nay, to have been born in England chiefly