144. At the time of his first residence in London, he painted more marines than anything else. But other work was in store for him. About the year 1818, his health, which as we have seen had never been vigorous, showed signs of increasing weakness, and a short trial of continental air was recommended. The route by Havre to Rouen was chosen, and Prout found himself, for the first time, in the grotesque labyrinths of the Norman streets. There are few minds so apathetic as to receive no impulse of new delight from their first acquaintance with continental scenery and architecture; and Rouen was, of all the cities of France, the richest in those objects with which the painter's mind had the profoundest sympathy. It was other then than it is now; revolutionary fury had indeed spent itself upon many of its noblest monuments, but the interference of modern restoration or improvement was unknown. Better the unloosed rage of the fiend than the scrabble of self-complacent idiocy. The facade of the cathedral was as yet unencumbered by the blocks of new stonework, never to be carved, by which it is now defaced; the Church of St. Nicholas existed, (the last fragments of the niches of its gateway were seen by the writer dashed upon the pavement in 1840 to make room for the new "Hotel St. Nicholas"); the Gothic turret had not vanished from the angle of the Place de la Pucelle, the Palais de Justice remained in its gray antiquity, and the Norman houses still lifted their fantastic ridges of gable along the busy quay (now fronted by as formal a range of hotels and offices as that of the West Cliff of Brighton). All was at unity with itself, and the city lay under its guarding hills, one labyrinth of delight, its gray and fretted towers, misty in their magnificence of height, letting the sky like blue enamel through the foiled spaces of their crowns of open work; the walls and gates of its countless churches wardered by saintly groups of solemn statuary, clasped about by wandering stems of sculptured leafage, and crowned by fretted niche and fairy pediment--meshed like gossamer with inextricable tracery: many a quaint monument of past times standing to tell its far-off tale in the place from which it has since perished--in the midst of the throng and murmur of those shadowy streets--all grim with jutting props of ebon woodwork, lightened only here and there by a sunbeam glancing down from the scaly backs, and points, and pyramids of the Norman roofs, or carried out of its narrow range by the gay progress of some snowy cap or scarlet camisole. The painter's vocation was fixed from that hour. The first effect upon his mind was irrepressible enthusiasm, with a strong feeling of a new-born attachment to Art, in a new world of exceeding interest. Previous impressions were presently obliterated, and the old embankments of fancy gave way to the force of overwhelming anticipations, forming another and a wider channel for its future course.