numerical superiority.

Sec. 42. I say his works are distinguished in this more than in anything
else, not because this is their highest quality, but because it is
peculiar to them. Invention, color, grace of arrangement, we may find in
Tintoret and Veronese in various manifestation; but the expression of
the infinite redundance of natural landscape had never been attempted
until Turner's time; and the treatment of the masses of mountain in the
Daphne and Leucippus, Golden Bough, and Modern Italy, is wholly without
precursorship in art.

Nor, observe, do I insist upon this quantity _merely_ as arithmetical,
or as if it were producible by repetition of similar things. It would be
easy to be redundant, if multiplication of the same idea constituted
fulness; and since Turner first introduced these types of landscape,
myriads of vulgar imitations of them have been produced, whose
perpetrators have supposed themselves disciples or rivals of Turner, in
covering their hills with white dots for forest, and their foregrounds
with yellow sparklings for herbage. But the Turnerian redundance is
never monotonous. Of the thousands of groups of touches which, with him,
are necessary to constitute a single bank of hill, not one but has some
special character, and is as much a separate invention as the whole plan
of the picture. Perhaps this may be sufficiently understood by an
attentive examination of the detail introduced by him in his St. Gothard
subject, as shown in Plate +37+.

Sec. 43. I do not, indeed, know if the examples I have given from natural
scenes, though they are as characteristic as I could well choose, are
enough to accustom the reader to the character of true mountain lines,
and to enable him to recognize such lines in other instances; but if
not, at all events they may serve to elucidate the main points, and
guide to more complete examination of the subject, if it interests him,
among the hills themselves. And if, after he has pursued the inquiry
long enough to feel the certitude of the laws which I have been
endeavoring to illustrate, he turns back again to art, I am well assured
it will be with a strange recognition of unconceived excellence, and a
newly quickened pleasure in the unforeseen fidelity, that he will trace
the pencilling of Turner upon his hill drawings. I do not choose to
spend, in this work, the labor and time which would be necessary to
analyze, as I have done the drawing of the St. Gothard, any o