quantity of vegetation usually present on carriage roads, is given in a very cool-green grey, and the truthful colouring of the picture is completed by a number of dots in the sky on the right, with a stalk to them of a sober and similar brown. Not long ago I was descending this very bit of carriage road, the first turn after you leave Albano, not a little impeded by the worthy successors of the antient prototypes of Veieto.* It had been wild weather when I left Rome, and all across the Campagna the clouds were sweeping in sulphurous blue, with a clap of thunder or two, and breaking gleams of sun along the Claudian aqueduct, lighting up the infinity of its arches like the bridge of Chaos. But as I climbed the long slope of the Alban Mount the storm swept finally to the North, and the noble outline of the domes of Albano, and graceful darkness of its ilex grove, rose against pure streaks of alternate blue and amber, the upper sky gradually flushing through the last fragments of rain-cloud, in deep palpitating azure, half aether and half dew. The noonday sun came slanting down the rocky slopes of La Riccia, and its masses of entangled and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure of a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it, as with rain. I cannot call it colour - it was a conflagration. Purple and crimson and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank in the valley in showers of light, every separate leaf quivering with bouyant and burning life - each, as it turned to reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an emerald. Far up into the recesses of the valley the green vistas, arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks for foam, and silver flakes of orange spray tossed into the air around them, breaking over the grey walls of rock into a thousand separate stars, fading and kindling alternately as the weak wind lifted and let them fall. Every blade of grass burned like the golden floor of Heaven, opening in sudden gleams as the fooliage broke and closed above it, as sheet lightning opens in a cloud at sunset. The motionless masses of dark rock - dark though flushed with scarlet lichen - casting their quiet shadows across its restless radiance; the fountain underneath them, filling its marble hollow with blue mist and fitful sound; and over all, the multitudinous bars of amber and rose - the sacred clouds that have no darkness, and only exist to illumine, were seen in fathomless intervals, between the solemn and orbed repose of the stone pines, passing to lose themselves in the last, white, blinding lustre of the measureless line where the Campagna melted into the blaze of the sea."

"And therefore we see at once that the stem of Gaspar Poussin's tall tree on the right of 'La Riccia' in the National Gallery is a painting of a carrot or a parsnip, not the trunk of a tree; for, being so near that every individul leaf is visible, we should not have seen in nature one branch or stem actually tapering. We should have received an impression of graceful diminution, but we should have been able on examination to trace it joint by joint, fork by fork, into the thousand minor supports of the leaves. Gaspar Poussin's stem, on the contrary, only sends off four or five minor branches altogether, and both it and they taper violently, and without showing why or wherefore - without parting with a single twig - without showing one vestige of roughness or excrescence, and leaving, therefore, their unfortunate leaves to hold on as best they may. The latter, however, are clever leaves, and support themselves as swarming bees do - hanging on by each other. But even this precious piece of work is a jest to the perpetration of the bough at the left-hand upper corner of the picture opposite to it - the 'View near Albano.' This is a fine example of the general system of bough drawing of the Italian School. It is a representation of an ornamental group of elephants' tusks, with feathers tied to the ends of them. Not the wildest imagination could ever conjure up in it the remotest resemblance to the bough of a tree. It might be the