Despite the efforts of Price and Knight to raise the picturesque to the stature of the beautiful and sublime, its fate as an aesthetic category was predicted, albeit unwittingly, by Gilpin, the ambiguities of his work like so many tea leaves from which the future state of things might be read. The intensity of debate surrounding it in the closing decades of the eighteenth century notwithstanding, the picturesque proved inherently unstable. It was to receive its startling swan song and dénouement in Ruskin (in whose hands it is transformed into a moral category), find its way tangentially (as the superiority of art to nature) into the writings of Oscar Wilde (“The Decay of Lying” and “The Critic as Artist”) and James McNeill Whistler (“Ten O’Clock” Lecture), and to appear en passant in George Santayana (as the effect of interruption of symmetry by an interesting object); it was also deemed worthy of mention by Fry (in the artistic rearrangement of objects for emotional effect). Despite these persistent echoes, however, the picturesque was to lose its precarious and short-lived independence by being absorbed into the concept of sublimity developed by Wordsworth and the “early” Romantics, a term employed here to distinguish them from the “late” Romanticism of Hazlitt and Ruskin. There are facets of the picturesque and elements of the debates considered in the last chapter that hint at this, its protosublime character, and go some way to explaining its instability and eventual demise; the picturesque finds its culmination and full expression only when it capitulates to its more powerful aesthetic kin.