ambitious description of a combination of views from Rome to the Alban
Mount, for that is the range of the description, though, perhaps, the
description is taken from a poetical view of one of Turner's
incomprehensibles, which may account for the conclusion, "Tell me who
is likest this, Poussin or Turner?" Now, though Poussin never intended
to be like this, let us see the graduate's description of it. We know
the little town; it received us as well as our author, having left
Rome to visit it.

"Egressum magna me accepit Aricia Roma."

Our author, however, doubts if it be the place, though he
unhesitatingly abuses Poussin, as if he had fully intended to have
painted nothing else than what was seen by the travelling graduate.
"At any rate, it is a town on a hill, wooded with two-and-thirty
bushes, of very uniform size, and possessing about the same number of
leaves each. These bushes are all painted in with one dull opaque
brown, becoming very slightly greenish towards the lights, and
discover in one place a bit of rock, which of course would in nature
have been cool and grey beside the lustrous hues of foliage, and
which, therefore, being moreover completely in shade, is consistently
and scientifically painted of a very clear, pretty, and positive brick
red, the only thing like colour in the picture. The foreground is a
piece of road, which, in order to make allowance for its greater
nearness, for its being completely in light, and, it may be presumed,
for the quantity of vegetation usually present on carriage roads, is
given in a very cool green-grey, and the truthful colouring of the
picture is completed by a number of dots in the sky on the right, with
a stalk to them, of a sober and similar brown." We need not say how
unlike is this description of the picture. We pass on to--"Not long
ago, I was slowly _descending_ this very bit of carriage road, the
first turn after you leave Albano;--it had been wild weather when I
left Rome, and all across the Campagna the clouds were sweeping in
sulphurous blue, with a clap of thunder or two, and breaking gleams of
sun along the Claudian aqueduct, lighting up the infinity of its
arches like the bridge of Chaos. But as I _climbed_ the long slope of
the Alban mount, the storm swept finally to the north, and the noble
outline of the domes of Albano, and graceful darkness of its ilex
grove rose against pure streaks of alternate blue and amber, the upper
sky gradually flushing