A more influential writer than Whately was William Gilpin, an industrious clergyman and schoolmaster, who spent his holidays wandering and sketching in the most approved parts of England, Wales and Scotland. His books on the Picturesque were long held in esteem. The earliest of them was entitled _Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales . . . relative chiefly to picturesque beauty_ (1782). Others, which followed in steady succession, rendered a like service to the Lake district, the Highlands of Scotland, the New Forest, and the Isle of Wight. Those books taught the aesthetic appreciation of wild nature to a whole generation. It is a testimony to their influence that for a time they enslaved the youth of Wordsworth. In _The Prelude_ he tells how, in early life, he misunderstood the teaching of Nature, not from insensibility, but from the presumption which applied to the impassioned life of Nature the "rules of mimic art." He calls this habit "a strong infection of the age," and tells how he too, for a time, was wont to compare scene with scene, and to pamper himself "with meagre novelties of colour and proportion." In another passage he speaks of similar melodramatic errors, from conformity to book-notions, in his early study of poetry. The dignities of plain occurrence then Were tasteless, and truth's golden mean, a point, Where no sufficient pleasure could be found. But imaginative power, and the humility which had been his in childhood, returned to him-- I shook the habit off Entirely and for ever. Yet in one curious respect Gilpin's amateur teaching did leave its mark on the history of English poetry. When Wordsworth and Coleridge chose the Wye and Tintern Abbey for their walking tour, they were probably determined in that direction by the fame of the scenery; and when they and Southey settled in the Lake district, it may be surmised that they felt other and stronger attractions than those that came from Wordsworth's early associations with the place. The Wye, Tintern Abbey, the English Lakes, the Scottish Highlands--these were the favored places of the apostles of the picturesque, and have now become memorial places in our poetic history.