best parts of Cuyp, but at the same time there is not a single vestige of the same kind of solecism. It is true that in his fondness for colour Turner is in the habit of allowing excessively cold fragments in his warmest pictures; but these are never, observe, warm colours with no light upon them, useless as contrasts, while they are discords in the tone, but they are bits of the very coolest tints, partially removed from the general influence, and exquisitely valuable as colour, though, with all deference be it spoken, I think them sometimes slightly destructive of what would otherwise be perfect tone. * * * The best proof of the grammatical accuracy of the tones of Turner is in the perfect and unchanging influence of all his pictures at any distance. We approach only to follow the sunshine into every cranny of the leafage, and retire only to feel it diffused over the scene, the whole picture glowing like a sun or star, at whatever distance we stand, and lighting the air between us and it, while many even of the best pictures of Claude must be looked close into to be felt, and lose light every foot that we retire. The smallest of the three sea-ports in the National Gallery is valuable and right in tone when we are close to it, but ten yards off it is all brickdust, offensively and evidently false in its whole hue," &c.

"I wish Ruysdael had painted one or two rough seas. I believe, if he had, he might have saved the unhappy public from much grievous victimizing, both in mind and pocket, for he would have shown that Vandevelde and Backhuysen were not quite sea-deities. As it is, I believe there is scarcely such another instance to be found in the history of man of the epidemic aberration of mind into which multitudes fall by infection, as is furnished by the value set upon the works of these men. All others of the ancients have real power of some kind or other, either solemnity of intention, as the Poussins, or refinement of feelings, as Claude, or high imitative accuracy, as Cuyp and Paul Potter, or rapid power of execution, as Salvator; there is something in all which ought to be admired, and of which, if exclusively contemplated, no degree of admiration, however enthusiastic, is unaccountable or unnatural. But Vanddevelde and Backhuysen have no power, no redeeming quality of mind: their works are neither reflective, nor eclectic, nor imitative; they have neither tone, nor execution, nor colour, nor composition, nor any artistical merit to recommend them; and they present not even a deceptive, much less a real, resemblance of nature. Had they given us staring green seas with hatchet edges, such as we see 'Her Majesty's ships so-and-so' fixed into by the heads or sterns in the outer-room of the academy, the thing would have been comprehensible; there is a natural predilection in the mind of man for green waves with curling tops, but not for clay and wool; and the colour, we should have thought, would have been repulsive even to those least cognizant of form. Whatever may be the chilliness or mistiness or opacity of a Dutch climate and ocean, there is no water which has motion in it, and air above it, which ever assumes such a grey as is attributed to sea by these painters; cold and lifeless the general effect may be, but at all times it is wrought out of variety of hue in its parts; it is a grey caused by coldness of light, not by absence of colour. And how little the authority of these men is worthy of trust in matters of effect, is sufficiently shown by their constant habit of casting coal-black shadow half-way across the picture on the nearest waves, for, as I have before shown, water itself never takes any shadow at all, and the shadow upon foam is so delicate in tint and so broken in form as to be scarcely traceable. The men who could allow themselves to lay a coal-black shadow upon what never takes any shadow at all, and whose feelings were not hurt by the sight of falsehood so distinct and recoiled not at the shade themselves had made, can be little worthy of credit in any thing that they do or assert. Then, their foam is either deposited in spherical and tubular concretions, opaque and unbroken on the surfaces of the waves, or else, the more common case, it is merely the whiteness of the wave shaded gradually off, as if it were the light side of a spherical object, of course representing every breaker as crested, not with spray, but with a puff of smoke. Neither let it be supposed that in so doing they had any intention of represent-