The patriotic English were too much bound up with their own soil to acquire a taste for the exotic, ideal scenery of Wilson. There existed in them that patriotism, that feeling for home, which had turned the Dutch of the seventeenth century into landscape painters. In this province also they were destined to step in, as the inheritors of the Dutch, to bring the germ of intimate landscape to its full fruition. Lovely and luxuriant valleys with their soft grass, sweet woodlands with their vari-coloured foliage, golden, swaying cornfields and picturesque little cottages, with that indescribable softness of atmosphere, must of themselves direct the eye of the writer and the painter to all these beauties. It was an Englishman who in the eighteenth century wrote the most memorable book upon the charms of nature. James Thomson, in his _Seasons_, is the first great nature painter amongst the poets. Taine finds the whole of Rousseau anticipated in him. "Thirty years before Rousseau, Thomson had forestalled all the sentiments of Rousseau, almost in the same style." He has not only, like Rousseau, a profound feeling for the great wild aspects of nature, for the forms of clouds, effects of light and contrasts of colour, but he delights also in the smell of the dairy, in small birds, in the woodland shadows, and the light on the meadows,--in all things sequestered and idyllic. "Nature! great parent! whose unceasing hand Rolls round the Seasons of the changeful year, How mighty, how majestic are thy works! With what a pleasing dread they swell the soul That sees astonished and astonished sings." [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ GAINSBOROUGH. THE DUCHESS OF DEVONSHIRE.] [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ GAINSBOROUGH. THE SISTERS.] [Illustration: _Cassell & Co._ GAINSBOROUGH. THE WATERING PLACE.]