A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 23 



What an airy precision of touch there is here, and what a 

 sure eye for the points of character in landscape ! But the 

 picture is altogether subsidiary. No doubt the works of 

 Salvator Rosa and Caspar Poussin show that there must 

 have been some amateur taste for the grand and terrible in 

 scenery; but the British poet Thomson ( sweet-souled is 

 Wordsworth s apt word) was the first to do with words what 

 they had done partially with colours. He was turgid, no 

 good metrist, and his English is like a translation from one 

 of those poets who wrote in Latin after it was dead ; but he 

 was a man of sincere genius, and not only English, but 

 European literature is largely in his debt. He was the in 

 ventor of cheap amusement for the million, to be had of All- 

 out-doors for the asking. It was his impulse which uncon 

 sciously gave direction to Rousseau, and it is to the school 

 of Jean Jacques that we owe St. Pierre, Cowper, Chateau 

 briand, Wordsworth, Byron, Lamartine, George Sand, Rus- 

 kin the great painters of ideal landscape. 



So long as men had slender means, whether of keeping 

 out cold or checkmating it with artificial heat, Winter was 

 an unwelcome guest, especially in the country. There he 

 was the bearer of a lettre de cachet, which shut its victims in 

 solitary confinement with few resources but to boose round 

 the fire and repeat ghost-stories, which had lost all their 

 freshness and none of their terror. To go to bed was to lie 

 awake of cold, with an added shudder of fright whenever 

 a loose casement or a waving curtain chose to give you the 

 goose-flesh. Bussy Rabutin, in one of his letters, gives us a 

 notion how uncomfortable it was in the country, with green 

 wood, smoky chimneys, and doors and windows that thought 

 it was their duty to make the wind whistle, not to keep it 

 out. With fuel so dear, it could not have been much better 

 in the city, to judge by Mdnage s warning against the danger 

 of our dressing-gowns taking fire, while we cuddle too 

 closely over the sparing blaze. The poet of Winter himself 

 is said to have written in bed, with his hand through a hole 

 in the blanket; and we may suspect that it was the warmth 

 quite as much as the company that first drew men together 

 at the coffee-house. Coleridge, in January 1800, writes to 

 Wedgewood : I am sitting by a fire in a rug greatcoat. . . . 

 It is most barbarously cold, and you, I fear, can shield your 

 self from it only by perpetual imprisonment. This thermo- 



