I Should Like To Paint The Lessening Square Of The Wheat-Field, The Reaping Machine Continually Cutting The Square Smaller, As If It Traversed The Greek Fret.

People of the easel would not find it easy to depict the half-green, half-made hay floating in the air behind a haymaking machine. Sunlight falls on the modern implements just the same as on the old wooden plough and the oxen.

To be true, pictures of our fields should have them both, instead of which all the present things are usually omitted, and we are presented with landscapes that might date from the first George. Turner painted the railway train and made it at once ideal, poetical, and classical. His 'Rain, Steam, and Speed,' which displays a modern subject, is a most wonderful picture. If a man chose his hour rightly, the steam-plough under certain atmospheric conditions would give him as good a subject as a Great Western train. He who has got the sense of beauty in his eye can find it in things as they really are, and needs no stagey time of artificial pastorals to furnish him with a sham nature. Idealise to the full, but idealise the real, else the picture is a sham.

All the old things remain on the farm, but the village is driven out - the village that used to come as one man to the reaping. Machinery has not altered the earth, but it has altered the conditions of men's lives, and as work decreases, so men decrease.

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