And then, in studying Turner, he learnt to see that, lying intermingled with all the power and nobility of much of his work, there was a displeasing extravagance, a violence, a faultiness of detail, an exaggeration that often ruined his pictures. Neither he nor Claude were true to life; but there was an insolence sometimes about Turner's variation from fact, which made him shudder. How he seemed sometimes, in his pictures of places familiar to Hugh--such, for instance, as the drawing of Malham Cove--to miss, by his heady violence, all the real, the essential charm of the place. Nature was not what Turner depicted it; and he did not even develop and heighten its beauty, but substituted for the real charm an almost grotesque personal mannerism. Turner's idea of nature seemed to Hugh often purely theatrical and melodramatic, wanting in restraint, in repose. The appeal of Turner seemed to him to be constantly an appeal to childish and unperceptive minds, that could not notice a thing unless it was forced upon them. Some of the earlier pictures indeed, such as that of the frost-bound lane, with the boy blowing on his fingers, and the horses nibbling at the stiff grass, with the cold light of the winter's dawn coming slowly up beyond the leafless hedge, seemed to him to be perfectly beautiful; but the Turner of the later period, the Turner so wildly upheld by Ruskin, seemed to Hugh to have lost sight of nature, in the pleasure of constructing extravagant and fantastic schemes of colour. The true art seemed to Hugh not to be the art that trumpets beauty aloud, and that drags a spectator roughly to admire; but the art that waits quietly for the sincere nature-lover, and gives a soft hint to which the soul of the spectator can add its own emotion. To Hugh it was much a matter of mood. He would go to a gallery of ancient or modern art, and find that there many pictures had no message or voice for him; and then some inconspicuous picture would suddenly appeal to him with a mysterious force--the pathetic glance of childish eyes, or an old face worn by toil and transfigured by some inner light of hopefulness; or a woodland scene, tree-trunks rising amid a copse; or the dark water of a sea-cave, lapping, translucent and gem-like, round rock ledges; or a reedy pool, with the chimneys of an old house rising among elms hard by: in a moment the mood would come upon him, and he would feel that a door had been opened for his spirit into a place of sweet imaginings, of wistful peace, bringing to him a hope of something that might assuredly be, some deep haven of God where the soul might float upon a golden tide. One day, for instance, two old line-engravings of Italian pictures which he had inherited, and which hung in his little library, gave him this sense; he had known them ever since he was a child, and they had never spoken to him before. Had they hung all these years patiently waiting for that moment? One was "The Betrothal of the