ggeration of the muscular swellings,
or insipidity and want of spring in curvature, or fantasticism and
unnaturalness of arrangement, and especially a want of the peculiar
characters of bark which express the growth and age of the tree; for
bark is no mere excrescence, lifeless and external--it is a skin of
especial significance in its indications of the organic form beneath; in
places under the arms of the tree it wrinkles up and forms fine lines
_round_ the trunk, inestimable in their indication of the direction of
its surface; in others, it bursts or peels longitudinally, and the
rending and bursting of it are influenced in direction and degree by the
under-growth and swelling of the woody fibre, and are not a mere
roughness and granulated pattern of the hide. Where there are so many
points to be observed, some are almost always exaggerated, and others
missed, according to the predilections of the painter. Rembrandt and
Albert Durer have given some splendid examples of woody texture, but
both miss the grace of the great lines. Titian took a larger view and
reached a higher truth, yet (as before noticed) from the habit of
drawing the figure, he admits too much flaccidity and bend, and
sometimes makes his tree trunks look flexible like sea-weed. There is a
peculiar stiffness and spring about the curves of the wood, which
separates them completely from animal curves, and which especially
defies recollection or invention; it is so subtile that it escapes but
too often, even in the most patient study from nature; it lies within
the thickness of a pencil line. Farther, the modes of ramification of
the upper branches are so varied, inventive, and graceful, that the
least alteration of them, even in the measure of a hairbreadth, spoils
them; and though it is sometimes possible to get rid of a troublesome
bough, accidentally awkward, or in some minor respects to assist the
arrangement, yet so far as the real branches are copied, the hand libels
their lovely curvatures even in its best attempts to follow them.

Sec. 15. Bough-drawing of Turner.

These two characters, the woody stiffness hinted through muscular line,
and the inventive grace of the upper boughs, have never been rendered
except by Turner; he does not merely draw them better than others, but
he is the only man who has ever drawn them at all. Of the woody
character, the tree subjects of the Liber Studiorum afford marked
examples; the Cephalus and Procris, scenes