ing
of the pillowy organization which we may suppose best adapted for
functions of such delicacy and dispatch. But I do mean to say that the
clouds which God sends upon his earth as the ministers of dew, and rain,
and shade, and with which he adorns his heaven, setting them in its
vault for the thrones of his spirits, have not in one instant or atom of
their existence, one feature in common with such conceptions and
creations. And there are, beyond dispute, more direct and unmitigated
falsehoods told, and more laws of nature set at open defiance in _one_
of the "rolling" skies of Salvator, such as that marked 159 in the
Dulwich Gallery, than were ever attributed, even by the ignorant and
unfeeling, to all the wildest flights of Turner put together.

Sec. 8. Monotony and falsehood of the clouds of the Italian School
generally.

And it is not as if the error were only occasional. It is systematic and
constant in all the Italian masters of the seventeenth century, and in
most of the Dutch. They looked at clouds as at everything else which did
not particularly help them in their great end of deception, with utter
carelessness and bluntness of feeling,--saw that there were a great many
rounded passages in them,--found it much easier to sweep circles than to
design beauties, and sat down in their studies, contented with perpetual
repetitions of the same spherical conceptions, having about the same
relation to the clouds of nature, that a child's carving of a turnip has
to the head of the Apollo. Look at the round things about the sun in the
bricky Claude, the smallest of the three Seaports in the National
Gallery. They are a great deal more like half-crowns than clouds. Take
the ropy, tough-looking wreath in the Sacrifice of Isaac, and find one
part of it, if you can, which is not the repetition of every other part
of it, all together being as round and vapid as the brush could draw
them; or take the two cauliflower-like protuberances in No. 220 of the
Dulwich Gallery, and admire the studied similarity between them; you
cannot tell which is which; or take the so-called Nicholas Poussin, No.
212, Dulwich Gallery, in which, from the brown trees to the right-hand
side of the picture, there is not one line which is not physically
impossible.

Sec. 9. Vast size of congregated masses of cloud.

Sec. 10. Demonstrable by comparison with mountain ranges.

But it is not the outline only which is thus systematically fals