days by the art of the Middle Age and the Renaissance. They must learn
to copy, before they can learn to surpass; and, meanwhile, they must
learn--indeed they have learnt--that decay is ugliness, and the imitation
of decay, a making money out of the public shame.

The picturesque sprang up, as far as I can discover, suddenly, during the
time of exhaustion and recklessness which followed the great struggles of
the sixteenth century. Salvator Rosa and Callot, two of the earliest
professors of picturesque art, have never been since surpassed. For
indeed, they drew from life. The rags and the ruins, material, and alas!
spiritual, were all around them; the lands and the creeds alike lay
waste. There was ruffianism and misery among the masses of Europe;
unbelief and artificiality among the upper classes; churches and
monasteries defiled, cities sacked, farmsteads plundered and ruinate, and
all the wretchedness which Callot has immortalised--for a warning to evil
rulers--in his Miseres de la Guerre. The world was all gone wrong: but
as for setting it right again--who could do that? And so men fell into a
sentimental regret for the past, and its beauties, all exaggerated by the
foreshortening of time; while they wanted strength or faith to reproduce
it. At last they became so accustomed to the rags and ruins, that they
looked on them as the normal condition of humanity, as the normal field
for painters.

Only now and then, and especially toward the latter half of the
eighteenth century, when thought began to revive, and men dreamed of
putting the world to rights once more, there rose before them glimpses of
an Arcadian ideal. Country life--the primaeval calling of men--how
graceful and pure it might be! How graceful--if not pure--it once had
been! The boors of Teniers and the beggars of Murillo might be true to
present fact; but there was a fairer ideal, which once had been fact, in