But Sir Joshua does not compare with Gainsborough in landscape; there the
lover of Nature had the advantage over the lover of Poussin and Claude.
The famous picture of Puck, which Lord Fitzwilliam lately bought at Mr.
Rogers's sale for the extravagant sum of nine hundred and eighty guineas,
is here for all eyes to see how far the imagination of the President of the
Royal Academy differed from that of Shakspeare.

But the principles which Sir Joshua laid down, though they did not ruin
his own works, did much to ruin those of the next generation of painters.
There was still the struggle between the painters by rule and according to
convention, and the painters of truth as found in Nature. But the painters
of Nature were in a minority so small as to be powerless against the
prevailing current. English Art seemed to be running down; cold formalisms,
classicalities, extravagances, affectations, imitations, "high art,"
occupied the field almost to the exclusion of better things. West, Fuseli,
Northcote, Barry, Sir Thomas Lawrence, Haydon, Maclise, and Sir Charles
Eastlake form a famous line of painters who have been admired, but whose
works have little value except as warnings, and as showing into what errors
a false method and want of recognition of the foundation and the end of Art
may lead men not destitute of ability.

But while these men had their day, the school of the lovers of Nature as
seen in the external world was making irregular progress. The overwhelming
pressure of conventional traditions is shown most forcibly, however, by
the fact that the great leader of this school of the students of landscape
nature, the man to whom was given the power to see and to represent Nature
in all the changing glories and beauties of her ceaselessly varying
moods, the man who knew the value of truth and set his desires upon it
accordingly,--that this man should have been for years of his life kept
down to the imitation of and competition with the works of painters of