-hatching stands for everything; and inexcusably,
for though we cannot expect every engraver to etch like Rembrandt or
Albert Durer, or every wood-cutter to draw like Titian, at least
something of the system and power of the grand works of those men
might be preserved, and some mind and meaning stolen into the
reticulation of the restless modern lines.

CHAPTER III.

OF TRUTH OF CHIAROSCURO.

Sec. 1. We are not at present to examine particular effects of light.

It is not my intention to enter, in the present portion of the work,
upon any examination of Turner's particular effects of light. We must
know something about what is beautiful before we speak of these.

At present I wish only to insist upon two great principles of
chiaroscuro, which are observed throughout the works of the great modern
master, and set at defiance by the ancients--great general laws, which
may, or may not, be sources of beauty, but whose observance is
indisputably necessary to truth.

Go out some bright sunny day in winter, and look for a tree with a broad
trunk, having rather delicate boughs hanging down on the sunny side,
near the trunk. Stand four or five yards from it, with your back to the
sun. You will find that the boughs between you and the trunk of the tree
are very indistinct, that you confound them in places with the trunk
itself, and cannot possibly trace one of them from its insertion to its
extremity. But the shadows which they cast upon the trunk, you will find
clear, dark, and distinct, perfectly traceable through their whole
course, except when they are interrupted by the crossing boughs. And if
you retire backwards, you will come to a point where you cannot see the
intervening boughs at all, or only a fragment of them here and there,
but can still see their shadows perfectly plain. Now, this may serve to
show you the immense prominence and importance of shadows where there is
anything like bright light. They are, in fact, commonly far more
conspicuous than the thing which casts them, for being as large as the
casting object, and altogether made up of a blackness deeper than the
darkest part of the casting object, (while that object is also broken up
with positive and reflected lights,) their large, broad, unbroken
spaces, tell strongly on the eye, especially as all form is rendered
partially, often totally invisible within them, and as