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the lines of nature can only be represented by a similar freedom in the hand that follows them; there are curves in the flow of the hair, and in the form of the features, and in the muscular outline of the body, which can in no wise be caught but by a sympathetic freedom in the stroke of the pencil. I do not care what example is taken; be it the most subtle and careful work of Leonardo himself, there will be found a play and power and ease in the outlines, which no slow effort could ever imitate. And if the Pre-Raphaelites do not understand how this kind of power, in its highest perfection, may be united with the most severe rendering of all other orders of truth, and especially of those with which they themselves have most sympathy, let them look at the drawings of John Lewis.

58. These then are the principal lessons which we have to learn from Turner, in his second or central period of labour. There is one more, however, to be received; and that is a warning; for towards the close of it, what with doing small conventional vignettes for publishers, making showy drawings from sketches taken by other people of places he had never seen, and touching up the bad engravings from his works submitted to him almost every day,-engravings utterly destitute of animation, and which had to be raised into a specious brilliancy by scratching them over with white, spotty lights, he gradually got inured to many conventionalities, and even falsities; and, having trusted for ten or twelve years almost entirely to his memory and invention, living, I believe, mostly in London, and receiving a new sensation only from the burning of the Houses of Parliament,¹ he painted many pictures between 1830 and 1840 altogether unworthy of him. But he was not thus to close his career.

59. In the summer either of 1840 or 1841, he undertook another journey into Switzerland. It was then at least forty

¹[In the year following the fire of 1834, Turner exhibited two large pictures of this scene. One of them (formerly in the collection of Mr. Victor Marshall of Coniston) is now in the possession of Mr. Ponsford; the other, in that of Mr. Holbrook Gaskell.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]