she
diminishes the angles of ascent, and increases her divisions; and if we
would represent surges of size greater than ever existed, which it is
lawful to do, we must carry out these operations to still greater
extent. Thus, Turner, in his picture of the Slave Ship, divides the
whole sea into two masses of enormous swell, and conceals the horizon by
a gradual slope of only two or three degrees. This is intellectual
exaggeration. In the Academy exhibition of 1843, there was, in one of
the smaller rooms, a black picture of a storm, in which there appeared
on the near sea, just about to be overwhelmed by an enormous breaker,
curling right over it, an object at first sight liable to be taken for a
walnut shell, but which, on close examination, proved to be a ship with
mast and sail, with Christ and his twelve disciples in it. This is
childish exaggeration, because it is impossible, by the laws of matter
and motion, that such a breaker should ever exist. Again in mountains,
we have repeatedly observed the necessary building up and multitudinous
division of the higher peaks, and the smallness of the slopes by which
they usually rise. We may, therefore, build up the mountain as high as
we please, but we must do it in nature's way, and not in impossible
peaks and precipices; not but that a daring feature is admissible here
and there, as the Matterhorn is admitted by nature; but we must not
compose a picture out of such exceptions; we may use them, but they must
be as exceptions exhibited. I shall have much to say, when we come to
treat of the sublime, of the various modes of treating mountain form, so
that at present I shall only point to an unfortunate instance of
inexcusable and effectless exaggeration in the distance of Turner's
vignette to Milton, (the temptation on the mountain,) and desire the
reader to compare it with legitimate exaggeration, in the vignette to
the second part of Jacqueline, in Rogers's poems.

Sec. 21. Thirdly, necessary in expression of characteristic features on
diminished scale.

Another kind of exaggeration is necessary to retain the characteristic
impressions of nature on reduced scale, it is not possible, for
instance, to give the leafage of trees in its proper proportion, when
the trees represented are large, without entirely losing their grace of
form and curvature; of this the best proof is found in the Calotype or
Daguerreotype, which fail in foliage, not only because the green ra