claws of a witch - the talons of an eagle - the horns of a fiend; but it is a full assemblage of every conceivable falsehood which can be told respecting foiliage - a piece of work so barbarous in every way that one glance at it might prove to the mind of any man of the slightest knowledge of or feelings for nature the complete charlatanism or trickery of the whole system of the old landscape painters; for I will depart for once from my usual plan of abstaining from all assertion of a thing's being beautiful or otherwise: I will say here at once that such drawing as this is as ugly as it is childish, and as painful as it is false; and that the man who could tolerate, much more who could deliberately set down, such a thing on his canvass, had neither eye nor feeling for one single attribute or ecellence of God's works. He might have drawn the other stem in excusable ignorance, or under some false impression of being able to improve upon nature; but this is conclusive and unpardonable. Again, - take the stem of the chief tree in Claude's Narcissus; it is a very faithful portarit of a large boa-constrictor, with a handsome tail - the kind of trunk which young ladies at fashionable boarding-schools represent with nosegays at the top of them, by way of forest scenery. But let us refresh ourselves for a moment by looking at real art. We need not go to Turner; we will go to the man who, next to him, is unquestionably the greatest master of foliage in Europe - J. D. Harding. Take the trunk of the large stone pine (Plate 25) in the 'Park and the Forest.' For the first nine or ten feet from the ground it does not lose one hair's-breadth of its diameter; but the shoot, broken off, just under the crossing part of the distant tree, is followed by an instant diminution of the trunk, perfectly appreciable by both the eye and the compasses. Again, the stem maintains undiminished thickness up to the two shoots on the left, from the loss of which it suffers again perceptibly. On the right, immediately above, is the stump of a very large bough, who loss reduces the trunk suddenly to about two-thirds of what is was at the root. Diminished again, less considerably, by the minor branch close to this stump, it now retains its diameter up to the three branches broken off just under the head, where it once more loses in diameter, and finally branches into the multitude of head-boughs, of which not one will be found tapering in any part, but losing themselves gradually by division among their off-shoots and spray. Now this is nature and beauty too," &c.

"But it is only by looking over the sketches of Claude in the British Museum that a complete and just idea is to be formed of his capacities of error; for the feeling and arrangement of many of them is that of an advanced age, so that we can scarcely set them down for what they resemble - the work of a boy of ten years old; and the drawings being seen, without any aids of tone or colour to set it off, shows in its naked falsehood. The windy landscape of Poussin, also opposite the Dido and AEneas in the National Gallery, presents us in the foreground tree with a piece of atrocity which, I think, to any person who candidly considers it, may save me all further trouble of demonstrating the errors of ancient art. I do not in the least suspect the picture - the tones of it, and much of the handling, are masterly. I believe it will, some time or another, if people ever begin to think with their own heads, and see with their own eyes, be the death-warrant of Gaspar's reputation, signed with his own hand. That foreground tree comprises every conceivable violation of truth which the human hand can commit, or head invent, in drawing a tree - except only that it is not drawn root uppermost. It has no bark - no roughness nor character of stem; its boughs do not grow out of each other, but are stuck into each other: they ramify without diminishing, diminish without ramifying, are terminated by no complicated sprays, have their leaves tied to their ends like like the heads of Dutch brooms, and finally and chiefly they are evidently not made of wood, but of some soft elastic substance that which the wind can stretch out as it pleases, for there is not a vestige of an angle in any one of them. Now the fiercest wind that ever blew upon the earth could not take the angles out of the boughs of a tree an inch thick. The whole bough bends together, retaining its elbows and angles and natural form, but affected throughout with curvature in each of its parts and joints; that part of it which was before perpendicular being bent aside, and that which was before sloping being bent into still greater inclination, the angle at which the two parts meet remains the same; or, if the strain be put in the opposite direction, the bough will break long before it loses its angle. You will find it difficult to bend the angles out of the youngest sapling, if they be marked, and absolutely impossible with a strong bough. You may break it,