With regard to truth of tone, he observes--that "the finely-toned pictures of the old masters are some of the notes of nature played two or three octaves below her key, the dark objects in the middle distance having precisely the same relation to the light of the sky which they have in nature, but the light being necessarily infinitely lowered, and the mass of the shadow deepened in the same degree. I have often been struck, when looking at a camera-obscura on a dark day, with the exact resemblance the image bore to one of the finest pictures of the old masters." We only ask if, when looking at the picture in the camera, he did not still recognize nature--and then, if it was beautiful, we might ask him if it was not _true_; and then when he asserts our highest light being white paper, and that not white enough for the light of nature--we would ask if, in the camera, he did not see the picture on white paper--and if the whiteness of paper be not the exact whiteness of nature, or white as ordinary nature? But there is a quality in the light of nature that mere whiteness will not give, and which, in fact, is scarcely ever seen in nature merely in what is quite white; we mean brilliancy--that glaze, as it were, between the object and the eye which makes it not so much light as bright. Now this quality of light was thought by the old masters to be the most important one of light, extending to the half tones and even in the shadows, where there is still light; and this by art and lowering the tone they were able to give, so that we see not the value of the praise when he says-- "Turner starts from the beginning with a totally different principle. He boldly takes pure white--and justly, for it is the sign of the most intense sunbeams--for his highest light, and lamp-black for his deepest shade," &c. Now, if white be the sign of the most intense sunbeams, it is as we never wish to see them; what under a tropical sun may be white is not quite white with us; and we always find it disagreeable in proportion as it approaches to pure white. We never saw yet in nature a sky or a cloud pure white; so that here certainly is one of the "fallacies," we will not call them falsehoods. But as far as we can judge of nature's ideas of light and colour, it is her object to tone them down, and to give us very little, if any, of this raw white, and we would not say that the old masters did not follow her method of doing it. But we will say, that the object of art, at any rate, is to make all things look agreeable; and that human eyes cannot bear without pain those raw whites and too searching lights; and that nature has given to them an ever present power of glazing down and reducing them, when she added to the eye the sieve, our eyelashes, through which we look, which we employ for this purpose, and desire not to be dragged at any time--"Sub curru nimium propinqui solis."