hand, he was not a doctrinaire. 'I hold that no work of art can be
tried otherwise than by laws deduced from itself: whether or not
it be consistent with itself is the question.' This is one of his
excellent aphorisms. And in criticising painters so different as
Landseer and Martin, Stothard and Etty, he shows that, to use a
phrase now classical, he is trying 'to see the object as in itself
it really is.'

However, as I pointed out before, he never feels quite at his ease
in his criticisms of contemporary work. 'The present,' he says,
'is about as agreeable a confusion to me as Ariosto on the first
perusal. . . . Modern things dazzle me. I must look at them
through Time's telescope. Elia complains that to him the merit of
a MS. poem is uncertain; "print," as he excellently says, "settles
it." Fifty years' toning does the same thing to a picture.' He is
happier when he is writing about Watteau and Lancret, about Rubens
and Giorgione, about Rembrandt, Corregio, and Michael Angelo;
happiest of all when he is writing about Greek things. What is
Gothic touched him very little, but classical art and the art of
the Renaissance were always dear to him. He saw what our English
school could gain from a study of Greek models, and never wearies
of pointing out to the young student the artistic possibilities
that lie dormant in Hellenic marbles and Hellenic methods of work.
In his judgments on the great Italian Masters, says De Quincey,
'there seemed a tone of sincerity and of native sensibility, as in
one who spoke for himself, and was not merely a copier from books.'
The highest praise that we can give to him is that he tried to
revive style as a conscious tradition. But he saw that no amount
of art lectures or art congresses, or 'plans for advancing the fine
arts,' will ever produce this result. The people, he says very