tions of colour and light and shadow, and full of the
finest harmonies to all who can look at nature with the eye of
imagination.

Constable, a we have said, was not always successful in this, the most
hazardous of all attempts in painting. If the touches of pure white, which
he seemed to scatter on his trees as if from a half-dry brush, sometimes
assisted the dewy effect which he loved to produce, they very often, from
the absence of that power of _just calculation_ which Turner seems so
unerringly to possess, produced a spotty effect, as if the trees had been
here and there powdered with snow. Very frequently he exchanged the pencil
for the palette knife, in the use of which he was very dexterous, but
which, Mr Leslie admits, he occasionally carried to a blamable excess,
loading his pictures with a _relievo_ of colour, and provoking the remark,
that if he had not attained breadth, he had at least secured thickness.

On the whole, Constable, though now and then missing his
object--sometimes, it would seem, as in his skies, from overlabouring his
effect, and trying too studiously to arrest and embody fleeting
effects--was eminently successful in the result at which he aimed--that of
conveying vividly, and almost irresistibly, the sentiment and delineative
character of the scene. We have already quoted Fuseli's well-known remark,
when standing before one of his showery pictures. "I feel the wind blowing
on my face," was honest Jack Banister's remark, (no bad judge by the by,)
while contemplating another of his breezy scenes, with the rolling clouds
broken up by means of sunshine, and the bending trees turning out their
lighter lining to the gale. "Come here," was the remark of a French
painter, in the exhibition of the Louvre in 1824; "look at this picture by
an Englishman--_it is steeped in dew_." "We never ask," said Mr Purton,
"whether his figures be well or ill placed; _there they are, and unless
they choose to move on, there they must remain_." This truth and
artlessness, and natural action or repose of his figures, only equalled in
the English landscape by those of Gainsborough and Collins, he probably
owed, in some measure, to an observation of an early acquaintance--
Antiquity Smith, as he was nicknamed by his brother artists, who, at the
commencement of his studies, had given him this judicious advice:--"Do not
set about _inventing_ figures for a landscape _taken_ from nature; for you
cannot remain an hour on an