Phrenology is important to list here not only because of its publication date—so close to that of Cruikshank’s own work—but also because it is characteristic of the larger corpus of phrenological tracts. Spurzheim’s third edition of this book was published in 1825 and was one of five books extracted from a larger work entitled The Phsyiognomical System.

The ruins of this votive chapel, built in the medieval period, are set against a dramatic, mountainous backdrop. In the aquatints depicting the ruins of Castle Abergavenny and Raglan Castle the mountains are pushed farther into the background. Furthermore, unlike the complex ruins that Gilpin typically depicts, this image features a man-made structure that is surprisingly simple.

This image of tourists before a view of Dunster Castle highlights the importance assigned to the interaction of persons with natural or constructed elements of the landscape in Romantic-era tourism. Gilpin’s inclusion of human figures in this view of Dunster Castle departs from the way in which he represents tours of the River Wye.

The façade of a brick structure—with a sidewall jutting out to form a kind of corner—and a tree with a serpentine trunk take up the right half of the oval-shaped image. Light shining through the arched portal punctuates the façade and illumines the patch of grass before the entrance. A blind (blocked up) window is built into the wall just above this portal.

The image depicts a broad, flat plain, interrupted at its further end by a grey body of water. In the distance, a low mountain range looms in vague, dark contours against the sky, nearly touching the cloud formations above. Small, white buildings, dwarfed by the mountains, cluster on the plain between the body of water and the mountain range.

This depiction of an English ruin along the River Wye is well-balanced: trees gracefully line either bank; in the left background, a cluster of clouds reaches across the river in a figure that reflects the extension of trees from the right bank; and the ruins sit slightly off-center in the middle ground.

Louis Hawes notes that Romantic era ruins are often situated in the middle ground of paintings (“Constable's Hadleigh Castle 462). Although Warwick Castle is not a ruin, Fielding’s composition follows this trend, and additionally places the castle in the center of the lower register.