leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water - now lighted with green and lamp-like fire - now flashing back the gold of the declining sun - now fearfully dyed from above with indistinguishable images of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery flying. Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship,* as it labours amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, and, cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea," &c.

"It is curious, after hearing people expose themselves in maligning some of Turner's noble passages of light, to pass to some really ungrammatical and false pictures of the old masters, in which we have colour given without light. Take, for instance, the landscape attributed to Rubens, No.175 in the Dulwich gallery. I have never spoken, and will never speak, of Rubens but with the most revential feeling. I look upon him, taken merely as an artist, alone and incomparable, and I fully expect that the world will see another Titian and another Rafaelle before it sees another Rubens. Whenever, therefore, I see anything attributed to him artistically wrong, or testifying a want of knowledge of nature, or of feeling for colour, I become instantly incredulous, and, if I ever advance anything affirmed to be his as such, it is not so much under idea that it can be his as to show what a great name can impose upon the public. The landscape I speak of has beyond a doubt high qualities in it: I can scarcely make up my mind whether to like it or not; but at any rate it is something which the public are in the habit of admiring and taking upon trust to any extent. Now the sudden streak and circle of yellow and crimson in the middle of the sky in that picture, being the occurrence of a fragment of a sunset colour in pure daylight, and in perfect isolation, while at the same time it is rather darker when translated into light and shade than brighter than the rest of the sky, is a case of such bold absurdity, come from whose pencil it may, that if every error which Turner has fallen into in the whole course of his life were concentrated into one, that one would not equal it; and, as our coinnoisseurs gaze upon this with never-ending approbation, we must not be surprised that the accurate perceptions which thus take delight in pure fiction should constantly be disgusted by Turner's fidelity and truth."

"There is in the first room of the National Gallery landscape attributed to Gaspar Poussin, called sometimes 'Aricia,' sometimes Le or La Riccia, according to the fancy of the catalogue printers. Whether it can be supposed to resemble the ancient Aricia, now La Riccia, close to Albano, I will not take upon me to determine, seeing that most of the towns of these old masters are quite as like one place as another; but at any rate it is a town on a hill, wooded with two and thirty bushes of very uniform size, and possessing about the same number of leaves each. These bushes are all painted in with one dull opaque brown, becoming very slightly greenish towards the lights, and discover in one place a bit of rock, which of course would in nature have been cool and grey beside the lustrous hues of foliage, and which, therefore, being moreover completely in shade, is consistently and scientifically painted of a very clear, pretty, and positive brick red, the only thing like colour in the picture. The foreground is a piece of road, which, in order to make allowance for its greater nearness, for its being completely in light, and, it may be presumed, for the