still what limited truth it is, if truth it be, when through the last
fifty pages we have been pointing out fact after fact, scene after
scene, in clouds and hills, (and not individual facts nor scenes, but
great and important classes of them,) and still we have nothing to say
when we come to the old masters; but, "they are not here." Yet this is
what we hear so constantly called painting "general" nature.

Sec. 8. Character of the representations of Alps in the distances of
Claude.

Sec. 9. Their total want of magnitude and aerial distance.

Although, however, there is no vestige among the old masters of any
effort to represent the attributes of the higher mountains seen in
comparative proximity, we are not altogether left without evidence of
their having thought of them as sources of light in the extreme
distance, as for example, in that of the reputed Claude in our National
Gallery, called the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca. I have not the
slightest doubt of its being a most execrable copy; for there is not one
touch nor line of even decent painting in the whole picture; but as
connoisseurs have considered it a Claude, as it has been put in our
Gallery for a Claude, and as people admire it every day for a Claude, I
may at least presume it has those qualities of Claude in it which are
wont to excite the public admiration, though it possesses none of those
which sometimes give him claim to it; and I have so reasoned, and shall
continue to reason upon it, especially with respect to facts of form,
which cannot have been much altered by the copyist. In the distance of
that picture (as well as in that of the Sinon before Priam, which I have
little doubt is at least partially original, and whose central group of
trees is a very noble piece of painting) is something white, which I
believe must be intended for a snowy mountain, because I do not see that
it can well be intended for anything else. Now no mountain of elevation
sufficient to be so sheeted with perpetual snow, can by any possibility
sink so low on the horizon as this something of Claude's, unless it be
at a distance of from fifty to seventy miles. At such distances, though
the outline is invariably sharp and edgy to an excess, yet all the
circumstances of aerial perspective, faintness of shadow, and isolation
of light, which I have described as characteristic of the Alps fifteen
miles off, take place, of course, in a threefold degree; the mountains
rise