udiorum subjects are thoroughly great, and these are great because
there is in them the seriousness without the materials of other
countries and times. There is nothing particularly indicative of
Palestine in the Barley Harvest of the Rizpah, nor in those round and
awful trees; only the solemnity of the south in the lifting of the near
burning moon. The rocks of the Jason may be seen in any quarry of
Warwickshire sandstone. Jason himself has not a bit of Greek about
him--he is a simple warrior of no period in particular, nay, I think
there is something of the nineteenth century about his legs. When local
character of this classical kind is attempted, the painter is visibly
cramped: awkward resemblances to Claude testify the want of his usual
forceful originality: in the tenth Plague of Egypt, he makes us think of
Belzoni rather than of Moses; the fifth is a total failure, the pyramids
look like brick-kilns, and the fire running along the ground bears
brotherly resemblance to the burning of manure. The realization of the
tenth plague now in his gallery is finer than the study, but still
uninteresting; and of the large compositions which have much of Italy in
them, the greater part are overwhelmed with quantity and deficient in
emotion. The Crossing the Brook is one of the best of these hybrid
pictures; incomparable in its tree drawing, it yet leaves us doubtful
where we are to look and what we are to feel; it is northern in its
color, southern in its foliage, Italy in its details, and England in its
sensations, without the grandeur of the one, or the healthiness of the
other.

The two Carthages are mere rationalizations of Claude, one of them
excessively bad in color, the other a grand thought, and yet one of the
kind which does no one any good, because everything in it is
reciprocally sacrificed; the foliage is sacrificed to the architecture,
the architecture to the water, the water is neither sea, nor river, nor
lake, nor brook, nor canal, and savors of Regent's Park; the foreground
is uncomfortable ground,--let on building leases. So the Caligula's
Bridge, Temple of Jupiter, Departure of Regulus, Ancient Italy, Cicero's
Villa, and such others, come they from whose hand they may, I class
under the general head of "nonsense pictures." There never can be any
wholesome feeling developed in these preposterous accumulations, and
where the artist's feeling fails, his art follows; so that the worst
possible examples of Turner