hen Claude, Poussin, and Salvator were in the zenith of their
reputation; such were the precepts which, even to the close of the
century, it was necessary for a young painter to comply with during the
best part of the years he gave to study. Take up one of Turner's views
of our Yorkshire dells, seen from about a hawk's height of pause above
the sweep of its river, and with it in your hand, side by side with the
old Encyclopaedia paragraph, consider what must have been the man's
strength, who, on a sudden, passed from such precept to such practice.

Sec. 48. On a sudden it was; for, even yet a youth, and retaining profound
respect for all older artist's ways of _work_, he followed his own will
fearlessly in choice of _scene_; and already in the earliest of his
coast drawings there are as daring and strange decisions touching the
site of the spectator as in his latest works; lookings down and up into
coves and clouds, as defiant of all former theories touching possible
perspective, or graceful componence of subject, as, a few years later,
his system of color was of the theory of the brown tree. Nor was the
step remarkable merely for its magnitude,--for the amount of progress
made in a few years. It was much more notable by its direction. The
discovery of the true structure of hill banks had to be made by Turner,
not merely in _advance_ of the men of his day, but in _contradiction_ to
them. Examine the works of contemporary and preceding landscapists, and
it will be found that the universal practice is to make the tops of all
cliffs broken and rugged, their bases smooth and soft, or concealed with
wood. No one had ever observed the contrary structure, the bank rounded
at the top, and broken on the flank. And yet all the hills of any
importance which are met with throughout Lowland Europe are, properly
speaking, high banks, for the most part following the courses of rivers,
and forming a step from the high ground, of which the country generally
consists, to the river level. Thus almost the whole of France, though,
on the face of it, flat, is raised from 300 to 500 feet above the level
of the sea, and is traversed by valleys either formed by, or directing,
the course of its great rivers. In these valleys lie all its principal
towns, surrounded, almost without exception, by ranges of hills covered
with wood or vineyard. Ascending these hills, we find ourselves at once
in an elevated plain, covered with corn and lines of apple t