rtunate 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.

Sec. 7. And of the Italian school generally, defy this law.

But even this 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 latter 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 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 foliage--a piece of
work so barbarous in every way, that one glance at it ought to prove the
complete charlatanism and 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
canvas, had neither eye nor feeling for one single attribute or
excellence 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 portrait 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.

Sec. 8. The truth, as it is given by J. D. Harding.

Let us refresh ourselves for a moment, by looking at the truth. 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 largest 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 hairbreadth 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 both by the eye and the
compasses. Again, the stem m