That the artist was modest and unobtrusive, like his drawings, we may feel sure. As Leslie wrote, “So modest and unobtrusive are the beauties of his drawings that you might pass them without notice, for the painter himself never says ‘Look at this, or that,’ he trusts implicitly to your own taste and feeling; and his works are full of half-concealed beauties such as Nature herself shows but coyly, and these are often the most fleeting appearances of light. Not that his style is without emphasis, for then it would be insipid, which it never is, nor ever in the least commonplace.” Constable was one of the first to realize Cozens’s true greatness. “Cozens,” he said, “is all poetry,” and on another occasion he rather shocked Leslie by asserting that Cozens was “the greatest genius that ever touched landscape.” Yet this assertion contains nothing but the plain truth. Genius is the only word we can use to describe the intense concentration of mind and feeling which inspires Cozens’s work. To the analytic eye his drawings are baffling and bewildering in the extreme; it is impossible to find a trace of cleverness or conscious artifice in them. They make you feel that you are looking at the work of a somnambulist or of one who has painted in a trance. They are, I believe, the most incorporeal paintings which have been produced in the Western world, for the paint and the execution seem to count for so little and the personal inspiration for so much. The painter’s genius seems to speak to you direct, and to impress and overawe you without the help of any intermediary. In this respect Cozens is quite different from Turner. Even when he trusted most implicitly to his genius Turner was always the great artist, the great colourist, the incomparable master of his technique whatever medium he was working in. Beyond the sheer beauty of his simple washes of transparent colour there is hardly a single technical or executive merit in Cozens’s drawings that one can single out for praise or even for notice. Their haunting beauty and incomparable power are spiritual, not material. And as we can think of a spirit too pure and fine to inhabit a gross body like our own, so Cozens seems to be a genius too spiritual for form and colour and the palpable artifices of representation. Certainly no English artist relied more serenely and confidently on his genius, and subdued his art more absolutely to spiritual purposes. And this is what I think Constable meant when he called Cozens “the greatest genius that ever touched landscape”; he did not say that he was the greatest artist. As one of our illustrations we reproduce the drawing _Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo_ by Cozens (Plate I) in the collection of Mr. C. Morland Agnew. THOMAS GIRTIN