Page:The nature and elements of poetry, Stedman, 1892.djvu/191

Rh towns and in those old houses where architecture, furniture, wall-paper, were all "in keeping." Another illustration: the "Colonial" revival. How prim and monotonous it then seemed, and how a lad longed to get away from it! Citified folk long since got away, and with zest, to something vastly inferior,—to something with no style at all. At last the Colonial and Revolutionary homestead styles became rare to find in their integrity. Now we see a restoration of them; now we rediscover their lightness and fitness,—their beauty,—and are reviving them in all departments of taste; until, in fact, as I recently heard an artist break forth, "there is a great deal of taste,—and some of it is good!" It may be that another generation will tire of them, as we did, though it seems heresy to say so now.

For a long time after 1775, Sir Joshua Reynolds stood, in his work and "Discourses," as a Academic art. representative exponent of the academic. One must remember that he had no light task in promoting taste among his Anglo-Saxons; their race is not endowed with the intuitive Southern perception of the beautiful. The English acquire their artistic taste intellectually, except in landscape-gardening, although their poets seem to be even more noble (perhaps because more intellectual) than those of nations whose sense of material beauty Sir Joshua Reynolds. is congenital. Sir Joshua was a good deal of a poet with his brush. The chief of