rth away from them on each side." If the gentle
sketcher should happily escape a cuff from these cast-off clothes
flung by excited earth from her extremities, he may be satisfied with
repose in the lap of mother earth, who must be considerably fat and
cushioned, though some may entertain a fear of being overlaid. What is
the artist to do with an earth like this, body and bones? When he sits
down to sketch some placid landscape, is he to think of poor nature
with her bones sticking out from twenty-five thousand feet of her
solid flesh! Mother of Gargantia--thou wert but a dwarf! Salvator Rosa
could not paint rock; Gaspar Poussin could not paint rock. A rock, in
short, is such a thing as nobody ought to paint, or can paint but
Turner; and all that, after his description of rock, we believe; but
were not prepared to learn that "the foreground of the 'Napoleon' in
last year's Academy," is "one of the most exquisite pieces of rock
truth ever put on canvass." In fact, we really, in ignorance to be
ashamed of, did not know there was any rock there at all. We only
remember Napoleon and his cocked-hat--now, this is extraordinary; for
as _we_ only or chiefly remember the cocked-hat, so he sees the said
cocked-hat in Salvator's rocks, where we never saw such a thing,
though "he has succeeded in covering his foregrounds with forms which
approximate to those of drapery, of ribands, of _crushed cocked-hats_,
of locks of hair, of waves, of leaves, or any thing, in short,
flexible or tough, but which, of course, are not only unlike, but
directly contrary to the forms which nature has impressed on rocks."
And the nature of rocks he must know, having the "Napoleon" before
him. "In the 'Napoleon' I can illustrate by no better example, for I
can reason as well from this as I could with my foot on the native
rock." What rocks of Salvator's, besides the No. 220 of the Dulwich
gallery, he has seen, we cannot pretend to say; we have, within these
few days, seen one, and could not discover the "commas," the "Chinese
for rocks," nor Sanscrit for rocks, but did read the language of
nature, without the necessity of any writing under--"This is a rock."
Poor Claude, he knew nothing of perspective, and his efforts
"invariably ended in reducing his pond to the form of a round O, and
making it look perpendicular;" but in one instance Claude luckily hits
upon "a little bit of accidental truth;" he is circumstantial in its
locality--"the little piece of g