distinction between its solid parts, already as dark as we can make them, and its vacant hollows, which nature has marked sharp, and clear, and black, among its lighted surfaces? It cannot be but evident at a glance, that, if to any one of the steps from one distance to another we give the same quanitity of difference in pitch of shade which nature does, we must pay for this expenditure of our means by totally missing half a dozen distances not a whit less important or marked, and so sacrifice a multitude of truths to obtain one. And this accordingly was the means by which the old masters obtained their (truth?) of tone. They chose those steps of distance which are the most conspicuous and noticeable, that, for instance, from sky to foliage, or from clouds to hills, and they gave these their precise pitch of difference in shade with exquisite accuracy of imitation. Their means were then exhausted, and they were obliged to leave their trees flat masses of mere filled-up outline, and to omit the truths of space in every individual part of their picture by the thousand. But this they did not care for; it saved them trouble; they reached their grand end - imitative effect - they thrust home just at the places where the common and careless eye looks for imitation, and they attained the broadest and most fiathful appearance of truth of tone which art can exhibit; but they are prodigals, and foolish prodigals, in art: they lavish their whole means to get one truth, and leave themselves powerless, when they should seize (sic) a thousand. And is it indeed worthy of being called a truth, when we have a vast history given us to relate, to the fulkness of which neither our limits nor our language are adequate, instead of giving all its parts abridged in the order of their importance, to omit or deny the greater part of them, that we may dwell with verbal fideleity on two or three? Nay, the very truth to which the rest are sacrificed is rendered falsehood by their absence; the relation of the tree to the sky is marked as an impossibility, by the want of relation of its parts to each other.

Turner starts from the beginning with a totally different principle. He boldly takes pure white (and justly, for it it the sign of the most intense sunbeams) for his highest light, and lamp-black for his deepest shade, and between these he makes every degree of shade indicative of a separate degree of distance, giving each step of approach, not the exact difference in pitch which it would have in nature, but a difference bearing the same proportion to that which his sum of possible shade bears to the sum of nature's shade, so that an object half way between his horizon and his foreground will be exactly in half tint of force, and every minute division of intermediate space will have just its proportionate share of the lesser sum, and no more. Hence where the old masters expressed one distance he expresses a hundred, and where they said furlongs he says leagues. Which of these modes of procedure be most agreeable with truth I think I may safely leave the reader to decide for himself.

He will see in this very first instance one proof of what we have asserted, that the deceptive imitation of nature is inconsistent with real truth; for the very means by which the old masters attained the apparent accuracy of tone which is so satisfying to the eye, compelled them to give up all idea of real relations of retirement, and to represent a few successive and marked stages of distance, like the scenes of a theatre, instead of the imperceptible, multitudinous, symmetrical retirement of nature, who is not more careful to separate her nearest bush from her farthest one than to separate the nearest bough of that bush from the one next to it.

Take, for instance, one of the finest landscapes that ancient art has produced - the work of a really great and intellectual mind, the quiet Nicholas Poussin, in our own National Gallery, with the traveller washing his feet. The first idea we receive from this picture is that it is evening, and all the light coming from the horizon. Not so. It is full noon, the light coming steep from the left, as is shown by the shadow of the stick on the right hand pedestal, (for if the sun were not very high, that shadow could not lose itself half way down; and if it were not lateral, the shadow would slope, instead of being vertical.) Now, ask yourself, and answer candidly, if those black masses of foliage, in which scarcely any form is seen but the outline, be a true representation of trees under noon-day sunlight, sloping from the left, bringing out, as it necessarily would do, their masses into golden green, and marking every leaf and bough with sharp shadow and sparkling light? The only truth in the picture is the exact pitch of relief against the sky of both trees and hills, the intricacy of the foliage, and every thing indicative either of the nature of the light or the character of the objects is sacrificed. So much falsehood does it cost to obtain two apparent truths of tone. Or take, as a still more glaring instance, No.260 in the Dulwich Gallery, where the trunks of the trees, even those farthest off, on the left, are as black as