So far as Nature is concerned, the passages cited show Pennant at his best. His descriptions are full, clear, painstaking, but unimaginative. He is as impersonal and impartial, as conscientiously exact, in taking notes on a landscape as in recording the annual haul of fish in Scotch lakes. Beautiful scenes were to him an object of intellectual curiosity. They made no artistic or emotional appeal. “The visions of the hills and the souls of lonely places” were a strain upon him. He was glad to come forth into fertile valleys and pleasant corn lands. All this is true, and Pennant shows much less of the new spirit than Brown, Amory, Young, and Gray. But his work was done independently of theirs, and in 1769. He must have been in the Lake District a month before Gray, and he penetrated into much wilder regions of Scotland than had before been described. That his instinctive shrinking from wild scenes should have been so far overcome as it was, that he should have been often forced into admiration, is of itself proof of the strength of the new impulse. The Rev. William Gilpin made many tours and gave full accounts of them, but the accounts were not published till years after the tours were made. His chief travels in their order are: (1) Tour in Norfolk, Cambridge, Suffolk, and Essex (1769; account published 1809); (2) tour along the river Wye (1770; published 1782); (3) tour in Cumberland and Westmoreland (1772; published 1786); (4) tour in North Wales (1773; published 1809); (5) tour in Hampshire, Sussex, and Kent (1774; published 1804); (6) tour in the Highlands of Scotland (1776; published 1789); (7) tour in Western England (before 1778; published 1798). Mr. Gilpin’s point of view is clearly stated in the Preface to the first of these publications. “The following little work proposes a new object of pursuit: that of examining the face of a country by the rules of picturesque beauty.” He hopes that no one will consider his plan unduly light and trivial for a clergyman. He is himself convinced that to study the beauty of a country is as noble, in a way as useful, as to study its agriculture. By picturesque beauty Gilpin always means beauty that can be put into a picture. He draws pictures of mountains to show whether they have or have not a good sky-line. Some are too regular, some are grotesque, some look deformed. He seldom dwells long on wide views because they are so difficult to make interesting in a picture. The grandeur of Penmaenmawr and Snowdon hardly makes up to him for their lack of picturesqueness. Penmaenmawr “has no variety of line, but is one heavy lumpish form.” He starts up Snowdon, but finding that it is merely “a collection of mountains formed on the old gigantic plan of heaping mountain on mountain,” he does not go to the top, but contents himself with quoting Pennant’s description of the view.