or
banditti; but the best average ship-painting no more reaches the truth
of ships than the equestrian troops in one of Van der Meulen's
battle-pieces express the higher truths of humanity.

[Illustration: FIG. 1.]

Take a single instance. I do not know any work in which, on the whole,
there is a more unaffected love of ships for their own sake, and a
fresher feeling of sea breeze always blowing, than Stanfield's "Coast
Scenery." Now, let the reader take up that book, and look through all
the plates of it at the way in which the most important parts of a
ship's skeleton are drawn, those most wonderful junctions of mast with
mast, corresponding to the knee or hip in the human frame, technically
known as "Tops." Under its very simplest form, in one of those poor
collier brigs, which I have above endeavored to recommend to the readers
affection, the junction of the top-gallant-mast with the topmast, when
the sail is reefed, will present itself under no less complex and
mysterious form than this in Fig. 1, a horned knot of seven separate
pieces of timber, irrespective of the two masts and the yard; the whole
balanced and involved in an apparently inextricable web of chain and
rope, consisting of at least sixteen ropes about the top-gallant-mast,
and some twenty-five crossing each other in every imaginable degree of
slackness and slope about the topmast. Two-thirds of these ropes are
omitted in the cut, because I could not draw them without taking more
time and pains than the point to be illustrated was worth; the thing, as
it is, being drawn quite well enough to give some idea of the facts of
it. Well, take up Stanfield's "Coast Scenery," and look through it in
search of tops, and you will invariably find them represented as in Fig.
2, or even with fewer lines; the example Fig. 2 being one of the tops of
the frigate running into Portsmouth harbor, magnified to about twice its
size in the plate.

[Illustration: FIG. 2.]

"Well, but it was impossible to do more on so small a scale." By no
means: but take what scale you choose, of Stanfield's or any other
marine painter's most elaborate painting, and let me magnify the study
of the real top in proportion, and the deficiency of detail will always
be found equally great: I mean in the work of the higher artists, for
there are of course many efforts at greater accuracy of delineation by
those painters of ships who are to the higher marine painter what
botanical draughtsmen a