Britton and the advice of Johns prevailed to make him cleave to architecture; and indeed from the first this had ever attracted him, though not so much the great achievements of the art, as its humbler yet lovely creations, the labourer's cottage, built of moor-stone, and thatched with reed or heather.
His health, always bad at the best of times, grew worse; he became so feeble that a trip to the Continent was recommended to him. "The route by Havre and Rouen," writes Ruskin, "was chosen, and Prout found himself for the first time in the grotesque labyrinths of the Norman streets. There are few minds so apathetic as to receive no impulse of new delight from their first acquaintance with continental scenery and architecture; and Rouen was, of all the cities of France, the richest in those objects with which the painter's mind had the profoundest sympathy." Now all is changed. The great churches stand up by themselves in the midst of modern houses destitute of beauty, islands of loveliness in a sea of vulgarity. Great streets have been driven through the town, picturesque houses have been swept away; that which is old has been barbarously renovated. The cathedral has been furnished with a ridiculous spire. Then "all was at unity with itself, and the city lay under its guarding hills one labyrinth of delight—its grey and fretted towers, misty in their magnificence of height, letting the sky like blue enamel through the foiled spaces of their crowns of open work; the walls and gates of its countless churches wardered by saintly groups of solemn statuary, clasped about by wandering stems of sculptured leafage, and crowned by fretted niche and fairy pediment, meshed, like gossamer, with inextricable tracery, many a quaint monument of past times standing to tell its far-off tale in the place from which it has since perished—in the
