_A View near Llangollen, North Wales_; _Oakhampton Castle, Devonshire_; and _The Bridge at Llangollen_, are the principal of Wilson’s English landscapes. They want almost every thing that ought to recommend them. The subjects are not fit for the landscape-painter, and there is nothing in the execution to redeem them. Ill-shaped mountains, or great heaps of earth, trees that grow against them without character or elegance, motionless water-falls, a want of relief, of transparency, and distance,—without the imposing grandeur of real magnitude (which it is either not within the province of the art to give, or which is certainly not given here), are the chief features and defects of these pictures.—The same general objections apply to _Solitude_, and to one or two pictures near it, which are masses of common-place confusion. In near scenes, the effect must depend almost entirely on the difference in the execution, and the details: for the difference of colour alone is not sufficient to give relief to objects placed at a small distance from the eye. But in Wilson there are commonly no details; all is loose and general; and this very circumstance, which assisted him in giving the massy contrasts of light and shade, deprived his pencil of all force and precision within a limited space. In general, air is necessary to the landscape-painter: and for this reason, the lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland afford few subjects for landscape-painting. However stupendous the scenery of that country is, and however powerful and lasting the impression which it must always make on the imagination, yet the effect is not produced merely through the eye of the spectator, but arises chiefly from collateral and associated feelings. There is the knowledge of the distance from which we have seen the objects, in the midst of which we are now placed,—the slow, improgressive motion which we make in traversing them,—the abrupt precipice,—the torrent’s roar,—the dizzy rapture and boundless expanse of the prospect from the highest mountains,—the difficulty of their ascent,—their loneliness, and silence;—in short, there is a constant sense and superstitious awe of the collective power of matter, of the gigantic and eternal forms of nature, on which from the beginning of time the hand of man has made no impression, and which by the lofty reflections they excite in him, give a sort of intellectual sublimity even to his sense of physical weakness. But there is little in all these circumstances that can be translated into the picturesque, which depends not on the objects themselves, so much as on the symmetry and relation of these objects to one another. In a picture a mountain shrinks to a molehill, and the lake that expands its broad bosom to the sky, seems hardly big enough to launch a fleet of cockle-shells.