, with a stunted bush or two growing
out of it, and a Dudley or Halifax-like volume of smoke for a
sky"--with Poussin, for that he treats foliage (whereof "every bough
is a revelation!") as "a black round mass of impenetrable paint,
diverging into feathers instead of leaves, and supported on a stick
instead of a trunk." A page or two from this, our author sadly abuses
poor Canaletti, as far as we can see, for not painting a tumbled-down
wall, which perhaps, in his day, was not in a ruinous state at all; it
is a curious passage--and shows how much may be made out of a wall.
Pyramus's chink was nothing to this--behold a specimen of "fine
writing!" "Well: take the next house. We remember that too; it was
mouldering inch by inch into the canal, and the bricks had fallen away
from its shattered marble shafts, and left them white and
skeleton-like, yet with their fretwork of cold flowers wreathed about
them still, untouched by time; and through the rents of the wall
behind them there used to come long sunbeams gleamed by the weeds
through which they pierced, which flitted, and fell one by one round
those grey and quiet shafts, catching here a leaf and there a leaf,
and gliding over the illumined edges and delicate fissures until they
sank into the deep dark hollow between the marble blocks of the sunk
foundation, lighting every other moment one isolated emerald lamp on
the crest of the intermittent waves, when the wild sea-weeds and
crimson lichens drifted and crawled with their thousand colours and
fine branches over its decay, and the black, clogging, accumulated
limpets hung in ropy clusters from the dripping and tinkling stone.
What has Canaletti given us for this?" Alas, neither a _crawling_
lichen, nor _clogging_ limpets, nor a _tinkling_ stone, but "one
square, red mass, composed of--let me count--five-and-fifty--no,
six-and-fifty--no, I was right at first, five-and-fifty bricks," &c.
The picture, if it be painted by the graduate, must be a curiosity--we
can make neither head nor tail of his words. But let us find another
strange specimen--where he compares his own observations of nature
with Poussin and Turner. Every one must remember a very pretty little
picture of no great consequence by Gaspar Poussin--a view of some
buildings of a town said to be Aricia, the modern La Riccia--just take
it for what it is intended to be, a quiet, modest, agreeable
scene--very true and sweetly painted. How unfit to be compared with an