"But suppose," replied Constable, "Gaspar could rise from his grave, do you think he would know his own picture in its present state? or if he did, should we not find it difficult to persuade him that somebody had not smeared tar or cart grease over its surface, and then wiped it imperfectly off?" The fiddle story can be told in fewer words. Sir George having recommended the colour of an old Cremona fiddle for the prevailing tone of everything in Nature, Constable answered by laying an old fiddle on the green lawn before the house. Sir George Beaumont was one of the last of the servile disciples of Claude Lorraine and the Poussins, who conjured their followers into believing that a landscape must be composed in the grand or "classical" manner, and must conform to certain academic rules. Claude's drawings, preserved in the British Museum, proclaim that he could be as frank, delightful, and impulsive as Constable in his sketches; but when Claude constructed a landscape of ruined temples and fatuous biblical or legendary figures, the inspiration of his drawing usually evaporated. Claude's genius remained, and there are pictures by him, notably "The Enchanted Castle," that in their particular manner have never been surpassed; but alas! it was not the genius that Sir George Beaumont imitated, but Claude's mannerisms and limitations. The stay-at-home Dutchmen who flooded the seventeenth century with their simple, homely, and often beautiful landscapes had no attraction for grandiose Sir George and his kin. The genius of Watteau which flashed into the eighteenth century, the commanding performances of Richard Wilson and Gainsborough in landscape, had no influence upon the practitioners of the grand manner. And in truth those pioneers suffered for their temerity. Wilson, who never quite cast off the classical mantle, accepted with gratitude, at the height of his fame, the post of librarian to the Royal Academy. Gainsborough would have starved had he been obliged to depend upon landscape painting for a living, and Constable would have been in financial straits had he been obliged to depend for the support of his family entirely upon the sale of his pictures.