did actually stand and grow thus, is
small comfort, for the artist might surely have found other and more
interesting forms telling the same tale. If light falling through loose
foliage does indeed make upon the garments of a lad lying beneath spots
at a little distance wonderfully like mildew, then rather let the boy
sit for us under a tree of denser foliage, where a pathetic subject will
not risk an unintentionally comic treatment. If a stone-breaker's face
corrupts in purple spots at a certain period after death, we would
prefer him painted before corruption, and consequently hideousness, had
begun. If women will wear gowns ugly in color and form, and will sit or
stand in graceless positions, we can readily avoid such subjects, and
bestow our careful finish upon more worthy models.

Let us not be misunderstood; we well know that the humorous, the
grotesque, the sublime may use ugliness to serve their own legitimate
purposes, but then that ugliness must be humorous, grotesque, or
sublime, and not flat, prosy, or revolting. A blemish is by no means
necessarily an ugliness. A leaf nibbled by insects and consequently
discolored, a lad with ragged jacket and soiled trowsers, a peasant girl
with bent hat and tattered gown, are often more picturesque objects than
the perfect leaf or the well-attired child.

Speaking of a certain artist, _The New Path_ says: 'He follows nature as
long as she is graceful and does not offend his eye, but once let her
make what strikes him as a discord, and which is a discord, of course,
for she, the great poet, makes no music without discords--and,
straightway, Mr. ---- takes out the offending note, smooths it down, and
thinks he has bettered nature's work.' Now, in music there are no
_discords_; so soon as a discord is admitted, the sounds cease to be
music;--there are _dissonances_, peculiar and unusual combinations of
air vibrations, but these are never long dwelt on, and must always be
resolved into the full and satisfactory harmony, of which the beauty is
enhanced by the momentary lapse into strangeness. Dissonance is never
the prevailing idea, and above all, never the final, closing one; it
must always bear a certain relation to the key in which it is used, and
the musical composition must be ended by the fullest and most
satisfactory chord, or suggestion of a chord, found in that key.

The majority of the Pre-Raphaelite school are willing to admit that
'there is but one Turner, and R