AQUILIUS.—At the earlier time, we take up little but what is consonant to our affections; the minor detail is an after lesson: but, as to this “natural” of landscapes, which seems to have so long held our artists and amateurs under an infatuation—as they construe it—this mindless thing,—after all what is its petty truth? Could the boy who hides himself under a hedge to read his Robinson Crusoe, put on canvass the pictures his imagination paints, do you think they would be exactly of the skies and the fields every day before his eyes? A year or two older, when he shall feel his spirit begin to glow with a sense of beauty, with the incessant love and heroism of best manhood—see him under the shade of some wide-spreading oak devouring the pages of befitting romance, “The Seven Champions of Christendom,” the tale of castles, of enchantments, of giants, and forlorn damsels to be rescued. Do you not credit his mind’s painting for other scenes, in colour and design, than any he ever saw? The fabulous is in him, and he must create, or look on nothing. He will take no sheep for a dragon, nor farmer Plod-acre for an enchanter, nor the village usher for an armed knight. The overseer will not be his redresser of wrongs. There is vision in his day-dream, but it is painting to the mind’s eye; and imagination must be the great enchanter to conjure up a new country, raise rocks, and build him castles; nay, in his action to run to the rescue, he has a speed beyond his limbs’ power, an arm that has been charmed with new strength. Now is he not quite out of the locality, the movement and power of any world he ever saw, of any world to whose laws of motion and of willing he has ever yet been subject? Take his pictures—look at them well; for I will suppose them painted to your sight: nay, put yourself in his place and paint them yourself—forgetting before you do so all you have ever heard said about landscape painting. Have you them? then tell me, are they untrue? No, no, you will admit they are beautiful truth. The lover paints with all a poet’s accuracy, but not like Denner. Now, if this mind-vision be not destroyed,—if the man remain the poet, he will not be satisfied with the common transcript of what, as far as enjoyment goes, he can more fully enjoy without art. He will have a craving for the ideal painting, for more truths and perhaps higher truths than the sketch-book can afford. And if he cultivate his taste, and practise the art too, he will find in nature a thousand beauties before hidden, that while he was the view-seeker, he saw not; he will be cognisant of the suggestive elements, the grammar of his mind and of his art, by which he will express thoughts and feelings, of a truth that is in him, and in all, only to be embodied by a creation. CURATE.—I fear the patrons of art are not on your side. Does not encouragement go in a contrary direction?