talians the flat. Nature's rule being the precise reverse--"You
shall never be able to count the bricks, but you shall never see a dead
space."

Sec. 6. Instances from Nicholas Poussin.

Take, for instance, the street in the centre of the really great
landscape of Poussin (great in feeling at least) marked 260 in the
Dulwich Gallery. The houses are dead square masses with a light side and
a dark side, and black touches for windows. There is no suggestion of
anything in any of the spaces, the light wall is dead gray, the dark
wall dead gray, and the windows dead black. How differently would nature
have treated us. She would have let us see the Indian corn hanging on
the walls, and the image of the Virgin at the angles, and the sharp,
broken, broad shadows of the tiled eaves, and the deep ribbed tiles with
the doves upon them, and the carved Roman capital built into the wall,
and the white and blue stripes of the mattresses stuffed out of the
windows, and the flapping corners of the mat blinds. All would have been
there; not as such, not like the corn, nor blinds, nor tiles, not to be
comprehended nor understood, but a confusion of yellow and black spots
and strokes, carried far too fine for the eye to follow, microscopic in
its minuteness, and filling every atom and part of space with mystery,
out of which would have arranged itself the general impression of truth
and life.

Sec. 7. From Claude.

Again, take the distant city on the right bank of the river in Claude's
Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca, in the National Gallery. I have seen many
cities in my life, and drawn not a few; and I have seen many
fortifications, fancy ones included, which frequently supply us with
very new ideas indeed, especially in matters of proportion; but I do not
remember ever having met with either a city or a fortress _entirely_
composed of round towers of various heights and sizes, all facsimiles of
each other, and absolutely agreeing in the number of battlements. I
have, indeed, some faint recollection of having delineated such an one
in the first page of a spelling-book when I was four years old; but,
somehow or other, the dignity and perfection of the ideal were not
appreciated, and the volume was not considered to be increased in value
by the frontispiece. Without, however, venturing to doubt the entire
sublimity of the same ideal as it occurs in Claude, let us consider how
nature, if she had been fortunate enough to originate so p