hy stream;--all exquisitely picturesque, and no less miserable.
We delight in seeing the figures in these boats pushing them about
the bits of blue water, in Prout's drawings; but as I looked to-day
at the unhealthy face and melancholy mien of the man in the boat
pushing his load of peats along the ditch, and of the people, men as
well as women, who sat spinning gloomily at the cottage doors, I
could not help feeling how many suffering persons must pay for my
picturesque subject and happy walk."

[6] Epitaph on Epictetus.

[7] I believe when a thing is once _well done_ in this world, it
never can be done _over again_.

CHAPTER II.

OF TURNERIAN TOPOGRAPHY.

Sec. 1. We saw, in the course of the last chapter, with what kind of
feeling an artist ought to regard the character of every object he
undertakes to paint. The next question is, what objects he _ought_ to
undertake to paint; how far he should be influenced by his feelings in
the choice of subjects; and how far he should permit himself to alter,
or, in the usual art language, improve, nature. For it has already been
stated (Vol. III. Chap. III. Sec. 21.), that all great art must be
inventive; that is to say, its subject must be produced by the
imagination. If so, then great landscape art cannot be a mere copy of
any given scene; and we have now to inquire what else than this it may
be.

Sec. 2. If the reader will glance over that twenty-first, and the following
three paragraphs of the same chapter, he will see that we there divided
art generally into "historical" and "poetical," or the art of relating
facts simply, and facts imaginatively. Now, with respect to landscape,
the historical art is simple topography, and the imaginative art is what
I have in the heading of the present chapter called Turnerian
topography, and must in the course of it endeavor to explain.

Observe, however, at the outset, that, touching the duty or fitness of
altering nature at all, the quarrels which have so wofully divided the
world of art are caused only by want of understanding this simplest of
all canons,--"It is always wrong to draw what you don't see." This law
is inviolable. But then, some people see only things that exist, and
others see things that do not exist, or do not exist apparently. And if
they really _see_ these non-apparent things, they are quite right to
draw them; the only harm is when people try to draw non-apparent thin