t which admits of great license and variety of arrangements, and in
which a certain amount of relation only is required; as especially in
the elements of landscape painting, in which best it may be illustrated.

When an unimaginative painter is about to draw a tree, (and we will
suppose him, for better illustration of the point in question, to have
good feeling and correct knowledge of the nature of trees,) he probably
lays on his paper such a general form as he knows to be characteristic
of the tree to be drawn, and such as he believes will fall in agreeably
with the other masses of his picture, which we will suppose partly
prepared. When this form is set down, he assuredly finds it has done
something he did not intend it to do. It has mimicked some prominent
line, or overpowered some necessary mass. He begins pruning and
changing, and after several experiments, succeeds in obtaining a form
which does no material mischief to any other. To this form he proceeds
to attach a trunk, and having probably a received notion or rule (for
the unimaginative painter never works without a principle) that tree
trunks ought to lean first one way and then the other as they go up, and
ought not to stand under the middle of the tree, he sketches a
serpentine form of requisite propriety; when it has gone up far enough,
that is till it begins to look disagreeably long, he will begin to
ramify it, and if there be another tree in the picture with two large
branches, he knows that this, by all laws of composition, ought to have
three or four, or some different number; one because he knows that if
three or four branches start from the same point they will look formal,
therefore he makes them start from points one above another, and because
equal distances are improper, therefore they shall start at unequal
distances. When they are fairly started, he knows they must undulate or
go backwards and forwards, which accordingly he makes them do at random;
and because he knows that all forms ought to be contrasted, therefore he
makes one bend down while the other three go up. The three that go up he
knows must not go up without interfering with each other, and so he
makes two of them cross. He thinks it also proper that there should be
variety of character in them, so he makes the one that bends down
graceful and flexible, and of the two that cross, he splinters one and
makes a stump of it. He repeats the process among the more complicated
minor bough