This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1869 Excerpt: ... JOHN CONSTABLE The Valley Farm SOME men of genius appear born to render the characteristics of their own country; to be representatives of France, or England, or Scotland, racy of the soil, impersonating and bringing before the eye the sentiments or scenes of their birthplaces, giving us the prejudices and narrownesses of the race to which they belong, it may be, or even setting especial store on them in a spirit of obstinate nationality, yet deriving strength from the simplicity and unity with which they have looked at the world through these local glasses. Others, again, although their own country and its ways may be nearest and dearest to them, yet regard the world with a wider glance; they unconsciously address the whole human family; they are alive to the limitations of their fellow-citizens, and do not make their little province the standard for the universe; to use a modern phrase, they are "cosmopolitan," whilst the others might be described as "national." Each side is open to obvious difficulties, may claim special advantages, and point to many of the greatest names in literature or art, even in politics and theology. Milton, Defoe, Burns, Scott, Wordsworth, Hogarth, Gainsborough, Walpole, Chatham; these (to confine ourselves to our own country), are all of them, more or less, men of the national type; whilst on the other side we may place Shakspeare, Bacon, Byron, Shelley, Turner, with William the Third, Canning, perhaps Marlborough, in politics. Or we might take Voltaire and Gothe as brilliant foreign representatives of these two schools. We admire the "cosmopolitan" genius most; we are apt to sympathize with the "national" most warmly. Landscape painting does not seem, at first sight, a natural field for the exhibition of these tendencies; never...