126 ARCHITECTURE AND PAINTING

inferiors; and I fear there are few men so wise as never to have imitated anything but what was deserving of imitation. The young Turner, indeed, would have been more than mortal if, in a period utterly devoid of all healthy examples of landscape art, he had been able at once to see his way to the attainment of his ultimate ends; or if, seeing it, he had felt himself at once strong enough to defy the authority of every painter and connoisseur whose style had formed the taste of the public, or whose dicta directed their patronage.

98. But the period when he both felt and resolved to assert his own superiority was indicated with perfect clearness, by his publishing a series of engravings, which were nothing else than direct challenges to Claude-then the landscape painter supposed to be the greatest in the world-upon his own ground and his own terms. You are probably all aware that the studies made by Claude for his pictures, and kept by him under the name of the Liber Veritatis, were for the most part made with pen and ink, washed over with a brown tint; and that these drawings have been carefully fac-similed and published in the form of mezzotint engravings, long supposed to be models of taste in landscape composition. In order to provoke comparison between Claude and himself, Turner published a series of engravings, called the Liber Studiorum, executed in exactly the same manner as these drawings of Claude,-an etching representing what was done with the pen, while mezzotint stood for colour. You see the notable publicity of this challenge. Had he confined himself to pictures in his trial of skill with Claude, it would only have been in the gallery or the palace that the comparison could have been instituted; but now it is in the power of all who are interested in the matter to make it at their ease.*

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* When this Lecture was delivered, an enlarged copy of a portion of one of these studies by Claude was set beside a similarly magnified portion of one by Turner. It was impossible, without much increasing the cost of the

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