f its delicate foliage, subdued and faint of hue, as
if the ashes of the Gethsemane agony had been cast upon it for ever; and
to have traced, line by line, the gnarled writhing of its intricate
branches, and the pointed fretwork of its light and narrow leaves,
inlaid on the blue field of the sky, and the small rosy-white stars of
its spring blossoming, and the beads of sable fruit scattered by autumn
along its topmost boughs--the right, in Israel, of the stranger, the
fatherless, and the widow,--and, more than all, the softness of the
mantle, silver grey, and tender like the down on a bird's breast, with
which, far away, it veils the undulation of the mountains;--these it had
been well for them to have seen and drawn, whatever they had left
unstudied in the gallery.

Sec. XIII. And if the reader would know the reason why this has not been
done (it is one instance only out of the myriads which might be given of
sightlessness in modern art), and will ask the artists themselves, he
will be informed of another of the marvellous contradictions and
inconsistencies in the base Renaissance art; for it will be answered
him, that it is not right, nor according to law, to draw trees so that
one should be known from another, but that trees ought to be generalized
into a universal idea of a tree: that is to say, that the very school
which carries its science in the representation of man down to the
dissection of the most minute muscle, refuses so much science to the
drawing of a tree as shall distinguish one species from another; and
also, while it attends to logic, and rhetoric, and perspective, and
atmosphere, and every other circumstance which is trivial, verbal,
external, or accidental, in what it either says or sees, it will _not_
attend to what is essential and substantial,--being intensely
solicitous, for instance, if it draws two trees, one behind the other,
that the farthest off shall be as much smaller as mathematics show that
it should be, but totally unsolicitous to show, what to the spectator is
a far more important matter, whether it is an apple or an orange tree.

Sec. XIV. This, however, is not to our immediate purpose. Let it be
granted that an idea of an olive-tree is indeed to be given us in a
special manner; how, and by what language, this idea is to be conveyed,
are questions on which we shall find the world of artists again divided;
and it was this division which I wished especially to illustrate by
reference