AQUILIUS.—Indeed! then I think you must have been led away by some associations, in which art had but little share. You have loved “A southerly wind and a cloudy sky,” as the song says, for the sport offered. Be not shocked, Gratian, at the confession, but the truth is, that I see very many outward scenes, that not only give me no pleasure but pain. Shall I confess a still more shocking heterodoxy; I have but little love for the scenery of the country!—am very often displeased with what offers itself, and becomes the common picture. Even in what is denominated a beautiful country, I look more for its suggestive materials in form and colour than for whole scenes. If pictures are to be no more than what we see—even landscapes, the art is not creative; and an imitative, uncreative art, leaves the best faculties of the mind unemployed. What is art without enthusiasm?—and you may be sure that no painter of views, and nothing more, was ever an enthusiast. It is the part of enthusiasm not to copy, but to make. Is it more startling if I assert, that the ideal is more true than the natural? Yet am I convinced that it is so. The natural requires the comparison of the eye; the ideal, as it is the work of the mind, will not be controlled by any comparison, but such as mind can bring. It commands the organ of sight, and teaches it. We all have more or less of this creative faculty; the education of the world is against it, for it is a world of much business, more of doing than of thinking, and more of thinking about what is foreign to feeling, than what cherishes it till it embodies itself in imagination. The rising faculty becomes suppressed. More or less all are born poets—to make, to combine, to imagine, to create; but very early does the time come with most of us, when we are commanded to put away, as the world calls it, the “childish things.” LYDIA.—Oh, I believe it—the infant’s dream is a creation, and perhaps as beautiful as we know it must be pleasing, for there are no smiles like infant smiles. CURATE.—And past that age, when the external world has given its lessons in pictures, which in practice and education we only imitate, do we not find the impressions then made of a goodness, a beauty, not realised and acknowledged in advanced life, as existing actually in the scenes themselves?