"Not long ago, I was slowly descending this very bit of carriage road.... The noonday sun came slanting down the rocky slopes of La Riccia, and their masses of entangled and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure of a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as with rain. I cannot call it colour: it was conflagration. Purple and crimson and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank into the valley in showers of light, every separate leaf quivering with buoyant and burning life; each, as it turned to reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an emerald. Far up into the recesses of the valley, the green vistas arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks for foam, and silver flakes of orange spray tossed into the air around them, breaking over the grey walls of rock into a thousand separate stars, fading and kindling alternately as the weak wind lifted and let them fall. Every glade of grass burned like the golden floor of heaven, opening in sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it, as sheet-lightning opens in a cloud at sunset; the motionless masses of dark rock--dark though flushed with scarlet lichen, casting their quiet shadows across its restless radiance, the fountain underneath them filling its marble hollow with blue mist and fitful sound; and over all, the multitudinous bars of amber and rose, the sacred clouds that have no darkness, and only exist to illumine, were seen in fathomless intervals between the solemn and orbed repose of the stone pines, passing to lose themselves in the last, white, blinding lustre of the measureless line where the Campagna melted into the sea. Tell me who is likest this, Poussin or Turner?" (vol. i. pt. ii. sec. ii. ch. ii. §§ 1-3). Ruskin further instances the picture as an example of "untruth of trees." It is an elementary law of tree structure that stems only taper when sending off foliage and sprays:-- "Therefore we see at once that the stem of Gaspard Poussin's tall tree, on the right of the 'La Riccia,' is the painting of a carrot or a parsnip, not of the trunk of a tree" (see further, _ibid._, vol. i. pt. ii. sec. vi. ch. i. § 6; and _cf._ vol. ii. pt. iii. sec. ii. ch. ii. § 18). 101, 102, 103, 104. THE FOUR AGES OF MAN. _Nicolas Lancret_ (French: 1690-1743).