Abel, the head of the sacrificed
firstling lies in the corner of the foreground, obscurely sketched in,
and with the light gleaming upon its glazed eyes. There is nothing
exaggerated about the head, but there is more horror got out of it, and
more of death suggested by its treatment, than if he had turned all the
trees of his picture into skeletons, and raised a host of demons to
drive the club.

Sec. 12. All these errors especially shown in Claude's sketches and
concentrated in a work of G. Poussin's.

Sec. 13. Impossibility of the angles of boughs being taken out of them by
wind.

It is curious that in Salvator's sketches or etchings there is less that
is wrong than in his paintings,--there seems a fresher remembrance of
nature about them. Not so with Claude. It is only by looking over his
sketches, 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 are those of an advanced age, so that we can scarcely set
them down for what they resemble--the work of a boy ten years old; and
the drawing being seen without any aids of tone or color to set it off,
shows in its naked falsehood. The windy landscape of Poussin, 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 farther 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;
yet 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 the heads of Dutch brooms;
and finally, and chiefly, they are evidently not made of wood, but of
some soft elastic substance, 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 bough of a tree an inch thick. The whole bough bends
together, retaining its elbows, and a