subordination and unity, yet preserving the interest, of the respective parts of the composition. In these beauties Claude completely fails, as do also Wilson, and most English artists who have made the attempt. The landscape overwhelms the story, while the story generally discredits the landscape; or, the attention being equally divided between both, the interest of each is weakened. This is sometimes the case with Gainsborough, often with Morland, and still more frequently in the Dutch school. In landscape painting, properly considered, the figures should always be subordinate, forming merely a part of, and corresponding with, the scene; most especially when that scene is from nature, and with her beauties ever fresh renewed, inexhaustible--there is something almost unhallowed in thrusting upon us the inferior, and mannered and crowded compositions of mere imagination. Nor is it a matter merely of taste; everything which has a tendency to lead the mind and the imagination of the artist away from nature, tends also to the deterioration of art. Hence the absurdities so visible in the history of this particular branch--Nature represented as if seen through a Claude-Lorraine-glass--skies gleaming and glaring under the appellations of sunrises and sunsets,--buildings of fantastic form and uninhabitable dimensions, under the name of Italian ruins--foliage and fields in every variety of tint, save the soft, quiet, unobtrusive hues of leaves and herbage. Surely of all painters, the British landscape painter is least excusable in deviating from the reality around him, which presents every element of his art in its best perfection, from the softest beauty in a freshness of dewy verdure elsewhere unknown, to the wildest sublimity of lake, mountain, wood, and torrent! Even in the gorgeous magnificence of our changing sky, there is a gloriousness, and grandeur of effect, which we have never seen even in Italy. If, again, he seek for objects of moral interest, there is the feudal fortalice--the cloistered abbey--the storied minster--the gothic castle, with all their rich associations;--there the mouldering monument--the fields of conflict, the scenes of tradition, of poetry, and of love--and, far amid the wild upland, gleams the mossy stone, and bends the solitary ash, over the martyr of his faith. For such as these the imagination can give us no equivalents.