ABSTRACT
615 What are things coming to Certain artists and critics seem tacitly to have conspired in order to defrand our national art of her grandeur and dignity. Just in proportion as our empire widens in extent do our pictures lessen in size ; in proportion as great thoughts struggle for utterance, do our artists play trivially with small ones ; and while we compass sea and traverse mountains in science and through commerce, in our Art, on the contrary, week after week, month following month, the painter pitches his camp-stool on a reedy heath or a sandy rabbit-warren, sufficient for his ambition if he immortalise the rabbits and the weeds. Instead of the grandeur of the storm, the gloom of mountain, the infinity of space, the spectator must botaniso among foreground flowers, watch the bee as it buzzes over marsh-mallows, marvel at the plumage of the linnet perched upon the twig, glance at the restless weasel as it treads nimbly over broken stones, or shudder at the spotted serpent gliding in the dewy grass. Year by year still the marvel grows ; not so much that the untiring hand is unpalsied by fatigue, not that genius can so stoop to drudgery ;—as that nature herself still holds her patience, that the leaf of spring does not grow yellow in autumn, and the sapling mature into the forest oak, ere the painter has dotted in the last leaf upon the tree, or put in, with conscientious patience, the indispensable primrose-bud.
