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as  yet,  in  my  own  humble  opinion,  has  never  been
surpassed.  In  Poussin  let  us  revere  the  great
creator  of  classical  landscape,  formed  by  a  combination -
  of  lines  winding  and  floating  from  the  fore-ground,
and  carrying  the  eye  to  the  horizon  with  the  almost
imperceptible  semitones  of  a  diacromatic  scale  in
music:  the  result  of  profound  study  and  erudition.
Many,  a  modern  artist  will  produce  a  stump  of  a
tree,  a  bunch  of  flowers,  a  blade  of  grass  ec.  with
more  fidelity  than  these  several  objects  are  to  be
found  represented  in  the  works  of  those  great  men,
where  they  are  the  mere  parts  of  a  great  whole,  a
mere  single  grape  in  the  bunch.  —  No  one  admires
for  instance  Constable  more  than  I  do,  but  though  he
sometimes  painted  a  corn  field  with  all  the  poppies  in
it,  or  some  “crisp”  or  “cool  bit  of  sunshine”  with
more  force  or  more  actual  manual  dexterity  than
either  Poussin  or  Salvator,  should  I  place  him  before
or  on  a  par  with  that  great  master,  whose  two
pictures  here  in  the  Guadagni  palace  are  enough  to
strike  terror  into  a  legion  of  bits  of  colour  and  stump
of  tree  amateurs  and  painters.
We  artists  however,  I  must  confess,  are  often
liable  to  be  guided  by  the  single  eye,  with  which
we  have  been  taught  to  mix  our  palate,  and  shut
the  other  on  every  one  who  does  not  possess  the
same  enviable  faculty.  This  sort  of  exclusiveness  I
can  easily  pardon  in  a  chef-d’-école,  in  an  Overbeck,
a  Cornelius,  an  Ingres,  a  Wilkie  or  a  Landseer;  but