Their variety arose out of their truthfulness. I had the same feeling when travelling in Holland and Belgium. It was to me a perpetual succession of reminiscences, and so it has been with others. Rubens and Rembrandt (as landscape painters)—Cuyp, Hobbima, were continually in my mind; occasionally the yet more poetical Ruysdaal; but who ever thinks of Wouvermans, or Bergham, or Karel du Jardin, as national or natural painters? their scenery is all _got up_ like the scenery in a ballet, and I can conceive nothing more tiresome than a room full of their pictures, elegant as they are. 131. Again, writing from Jerusalem, Wilkie says, “Nothing here requires revolution in our opinions of the finest works of art: with all their discrepancies of detail, they are yet constantly recalled by what is here before us. The background of the Heliodorus of Raphael is a Syrian building; the figures in the Lazarus of Sebastian del Piombo are a Syrian people; and the indescribable tone of Rembrandt is brought to mind at every turn, whether in the street, the Synagogue, or the Sepulchre.” And again: “The painter we are always referring to, as one who has most truly given the eastern people, is Rembrandt.” He partly contradicts this afterwards, but says, that Venetian art reminds him of Syria. Now, the Venetians were in constant communication with the East; all their art has a tinge of orientalism. As to Rembrandt, he must have been in familiar intercourse with the Jew merchants and Jewish families settled in the Dutch commercial towns; he painted them frequently as portraits, and they perpetually appear in his compositions. 132. In the following passage Wilkie seems unconsciously to have anticipated the invention (or rather the _discovery_) of the Daguerreotype, and some of its results. He says:—“If by an operation of mechanism, animated nature could be copied with the accuracy of a cast in plaster, a tracing on a wall, or a reflection in a glass, without modification, and without the proprieties and graces of art, all that utility could desire would be perfectly attained, but it would be at the expense of almost every quality which renders art delightful.”