It was to no purpose that certain painters, such as _F. C. Horsley_, _J. R. Herbert_, _J. Tenniel_, _Edwin Long_, _E. M. Ward_, and _Eastlake_, the English Piloty, by imitation of the Flemish and Venetian masters, made more of a return from idealism of form to colour, and that _Edwin Armitage_, who had studied in Paris and Munich, introduced Continental influences. They are the Delaroche, Gallait, and Bièfve of England. Their art was an imposing scene painting, their programme always that of the school of Bologna--the mother of all academies, great and small--borrowing drawing from Michael Angelo and colour from Titian; taking the best from every one, putting it all into a pot, and shaking it together. Thus English art lost the peculiar national stamp which it had had under Reynolds and Gainsborough, Constable and Turner. It became an insignificant tributary of the false art which then held sway over the Continent, insincere towards nature, full of empty rhetorical passion, and bound to the most vacant routine. And as the grand painting became hollow and mannered, _genre_ painting grew Philistine and decrepit. Its innocent childishness and conventional optimism had led to a tedious anecdotic painting. It repeated, like a talkative old man, the most insipid tales, and did so with a complacency that never wavered and with an unpleasant motley of colour. The English school still existed in landscape, but for everything else it was dead. A need for reform became urgent all the sooner because literature too had diverged into new lines. In poetry there was the influence of the Lake poets Wordsworth and Coleridge, who had simplicity, direct feeling for nature, and a Rousseau-like pantheism inscribed as a device upon their banner, and it came as a reaction against the dazzling imaginative fervour of those great and forceful men of genius Byron and Shelley. Keats had again uttered the phrase which had before been Shaftesbury's gospel: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." In the year 1843 John Ruskin published the first volume of his _Modern Painters_, the æsthetic creed of which culminated in the tenet that nature alone could be the source of all true art.