ations so daring and so various could not be introduced without
corresponding peril: the difficulties that lay in his way were more than
any human intellect could altogether surmount. In his time there has
been no one system of color generally approved; every artist has his own
method and his own vehicle; how to do what Gainsborough did, we know
not; much less what Titian; to invent a new system of color can hardly
be expected of those who cannot recover the old. To obtain perfectly
satisfactory results in color under the new conditions introduced by
Turner, would at least have required the exertion of all his energies in
that sole direction. But color has always been only his second object.
The effects of space and form, in which he delights, often require the
employment of means and method totally at variance with those necessary
for the obtaining of pure color. It is physically impossible, for
instance, rightly to draw certain forms of the upper clouds with the
brush; nothing will do it but the pallet knife with loaded white after
the blue ground is prepared. Now it is impossible that a cloud so drawn,
however glazed afterwards, should have the virtue of a thin warm tint of
Titian's, showing the canvas throughout. So it happens continually. Add
to these difficulties, those of the peculiar subjects attempted, and to
these again, all that belong to the altered system of chiaroscuro, and
it is evident that we must not be surprised at finding many deficiencies
or faults in such works, especially in the earlier of them, nor even
suffer ourselves to be withdrawn by the pursuit of what seems censurable
from our devotion to what is mighty.

Notwithstanding, in some chosen examples of pictures of this kind, I
will name three: Juliet and her Nurse; the Old Temeraire, and the Slave
Ship: I do not admit that there are at the time of their first appearing
on the walls of the Royal Academy, any demonstrably avoidable faults. I
do not deny that there may be, nay, that it is likely there are; but
there is no living artist in Europe whose judgment might safely be taken
on the subject, or who could without arrogance affirm of any part of
such a picture, that it was _wrong_; I am perfectly willing to allow,
that the lemon yellow is not properly representative of the yellow of
the sky, that the loading of the color is in many places disagreeable,
that many of the details are drawn with a kind of imperfection different
from what they woul