Literary landscape, on which I have already briefly expressed my views in treating of Sisley, is that which traditionally goes under the names of historical, heroic, ideal, or artificial landscape. It is not prompted by delight in nature, but is either the offspring of imaginative power or a piece of intellectual know-all work, in both cases, the result of reading. It is, to put it briefly, a continuous illustration of the literature in vogue. Since the Renaissance, ancient heroic materials have been specially favoured in poetry. The Spanish theatre, Corneille, and Racine lived on them. Even if they placed the lofty exploits of their heroes in a less remote past and on another stage than the ancient world, still, they endowed them with hundreds of reminiscences of the Græco-Roman mythology and history. Poussin, and even Claude Lorrain, conceived their landscapes as the frames of heroic romances and dramas. They were designed as stage decoration, which the spectator might people from his memory with figures in Roman mail-armour or Gothic plate-armour, familiar to him from contemporary poetry. In order to facilitate this play of fancy, ancient temples or ruins, perhaps even men in classical garb, helpfully stimulate the association of ideas. J. J. Rousseau substituted the sentimental for the heroic fashion; but the return to nature, which he and his innumerable imitators preached, did not to landscape painters at all mean the sinking into the contemplation of God’s actual world, but only the substitution for the heroes and knights, the upright or fallen marble pillars of their predecessors, of shepherds and shepherdesses, rustic cottages and herdsmen’s fires. Thus landscape painting illustrated in turn Orlando Furioso, Jerusalem Delivered, the Æneid, the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, Rousseau, Gessner, and Ossian; then, nearer to our time, Victor Hugo and the Romantics, Zola and the Naturalists, down to the latest symbolists and mystics, whose contemplation, so far as one can speak of such a thing in their gassy heads, greets us from the pictures of Burne-Jones and his continental imitators, and also from the landscape compositions of Puvis de Chavannes and Henri Martin. It may be safely affirmed that, of the pictures of literary landscape, not a single one would have been painted unless a book or some species of literature had, to some extent, commissioned them with an exact specification of all details.