y
association. It has already been noticed, in my pamphlet on
Pre-Raphaelitism, that his first conceptions of mountain scenery seem to
have been taken from Yorkshire; and its rounded hills, far winding
rivers, and broken limestone scars, to have formed a type in his mind to
which he sought, as far as might be, to obtain some correspondent
imagery in all other landscape. Hence, he almost always preferred to
have a precipice _low down_ on the hillside, rather than near the top;
liked an extent of rounded slope above, and the vertical cliff to the
water or valley, better than the slope at the bottom and wall at the top
(compare Fig. 13, p. 148); and had his attention early directed to those
horizontal, or comparatively horizontal, beds of rock which usually form
the faces of precipices in the Yorkshire dales; not, as in the
Matterhorn, merely indicated by veined coloring on the surface of the
smooth cliff, but projecting, or mouldering away, in definite
successions of ledges, cornices, or steps.

[Illustration: J. Ruskin. J. H. Le Keux.
40. The Mountains of Villeneuve.]

Sec. 26. This decided love of the slope, or bank above the wall, rather
than below it, is one of Turner's most marked idiosyncrasies, and gives
a character to his composition, as distinguished from that of other men,
perhaps more marked than any which are traceable in other features of it
(except, perhaps, in his pear-shaped ideal of trees, of which more
hereafter). For when mountains are striking to the general eye, they
almost always have the high crest or wall of cliff on the _top_ of their
slopes, rising from the plain first in mounds of meadow-land, and bosses
of rock, and studded softness of forest; the brown cottages peeping
through grove above grove, until just where the deep shade of the pines
becomes blue or purple in the haze of height, a red wall of upper
precipice rises from the pasture land, and frets the sky with glowing
serration. Plate +40+, opposite, represents a mass of mountain just
above Villeneuve, at the head of the Lake of Geneva, in which the type
of the structure is shown with singular clearness. Much of the scenery
of western Switzerland, and characteristically the whole of that of
Savoy, is composed of mountains of this kind; the isolated group between
Chambery and Grenoble, which holds the Grande Chartreuse in the heart
of it, is constructed entirely of such masses; and the Montagne de
Vergi, which in li