text: " In this passage is contained both the principle of Constable's painting and the history of its results: for strange as it may seem so little do general observers look at nature with an observing and pictorial eye--so much are their ideas of what it contains received at second-hand by reflection from pictures--that the forms under which artists have combined to represent her (forms representing it may be a portion of the truth but certainly not the whole truth) have in the great majority of cases superseded the stamp and authority of nature; and truth itself where it did not steal in under a conventional garb has been refused admittance by more than one committee of taste