he Pitti
Palace, attributed to Salvator, are, on the whole, the most vapid and
vile examples of human want of understanding. In the folly of Claude
there is still a gleam of grace and innocence; there is refreshment in
his childishness, and tenderness in his inability. But the folly of
Salvator is disgusting in its very nothingness: it is like the vacuity
of a plague-room in an hospital, shut up in uncleansed silence, emptied
of pain and motion, but not of infection.

5. _Dutch Period._ Although in artistical qualities lower than is easily
by language expressible, the Italian marine painting usually conveys an
idea of three facts about the sea,--that it is green, that it is deep,
and that the sun shines on it. The dark plain which stands for far away
Adriatic with the Venetians, and the glinting swells of tamed wave
which lap about the quays of Claude, agree in giving the general
impression that the ocean consists of pure water, and is open to the
pure sky. But the Dutch painters, while they attain considerably greater
dexterity than the Italian in mere delineation of nautical incident,
were by nature precluded from ever becoming aware of these common facts;
and having, in reality, never in all their lives seen the sea, but only
a shallow mixture of sea-water and sand; and also never in all their
lives seen the sky, but only a lower element between them and it,
composed of marsh exhalation and fog-bank; they are not to be with too
great severity reproached for the dullness of their records of the
nautical enterprise of Holland. _We_ only are to be reproached, who,
familiar with the Atlantic, are yet ready to accept with faith, as types
of sea, the small waves _en papillote_, and peruke-like puffs of
farinaceous foam, which were the delight of Backhuysen and his compeers.
If one could but arrest the connoisseurs in the fact of looking at them
with belief, and, magically introducing the image of a true sea-wave,
let it roll up to them through the room,--one massive fathom's height
and rood's breadth of brine, passing them by but once,--dividing, Red
Sea-like, on right hand and left,--but at least setting close before
their eyes, for once in inevitable truth, what a sea-wave really is; its
green mountainous giddiness of wrath, its overwhelming crest--heavy as
iron, fitful as flame, clashing against the sky in long cloven
edge,--its furrowed flanks, all ghastly clear, deep in transparent
death, but all laced across with lur