receive
brilliant reflexes from the lighted surfaces, on which the shadows are
marked with the most exquisite precision, especially because, owing to
the parallelism of cleavage, the surfaces lie usually in directions
nearly parallel. Hence every crack and fissure has its shadow and
reflected light separated with the most delicious distinctness, and the
organization and solid form of all parts are told with a decision of
language, which, to be followed with anything like fidelity, requires
the most transparent color, and the most delicate and scientific
drawing. So far are the works of the old landscape-painters from
rendering this, that it is exceedingly rare to find a single passage in
which the shadow can even be distinguished from the dark side--they
scarcely seem to know the one to be darker than the other; and the
strokes of the brush are not used to explain or express a form known or
conceived, but are dashed and daubed about without any aim beyond the
covering of the canvas. "A rock," the old masters appear to say to
themselves, "is a great irregular, formless, characterless lump; but it
must have shade upon it, and any gray marks will do for that shade."

Sec. 6. And total want of any expression of hardness or brittleness.

Sec. 7. Instances in particular pictures.

Finally, while few, if any, of the rocks of nature are untraversed by
delicate and slender fissures, whose black sharp lines are the only
means by which the peculiar quality in which rocks most differ from the
other objects of the landscape, brittleness, can be effectually
suggested, we look in vain among the blots and stains with which the
rocks of ancient art are loaded, for any vestige or appearance of
fissure or splintering. Toughness and malleability appear to be the
qualities whose expression is most aimed at; sometimes sponginess,
softness, flexibility, tenuity, and occasionally transparency. Take, for
instance, the foreground of Salvator, in No. 220 of the Dulwich Gallery.
There is, on the right-hand side of it, an object, which I never walk
through the room without contemplating for a minute or two with renewed
solicitude and anxiety of mind, indulging in a series of very wild and
imaginative conjectures as to its probable or possible meaning. I think
there is reason to suppose that the artist intended it either for a very
large stone, or for the trunk of a tree; but any decision as to its
being either one or the other of these must, I