Sometimes it may happen that, by rendering one detail faithfully, an artist may give a false impression, simply because he cannot render other details or facts by which it is accompanied in nature. Here, too, he would only sacrifice truth _in the cause of truth_. The admirers of Constable will perhaps dispute the aptness of our illustration. Nevertheless his works appear to us to afford a curious example of a scrupulous accuracy or detail producing a false impression. Constable, looking at foliage under the sunlight, and noting that the leaf, especially after a shower, will reflect so much light that the tree will seem more white than green, determined to paint all the white he saw. Constable could paint white leaves. So far so well. But then these leaves in nature are almost always in motion: they are white at one moment and green the next. We never have the impression of a white leaf; for it is seen playing with the light--its mirror, for one instant, and glancing from it the next. Constable could not paint motion. He could not imitate this shower of light in the living tree. He must leave his white paint where he has once put it. Other artists before him had seen the same light, but, knowing that they could not bring the breeze into their canvass, they wisely concluded that less white paint than Constable uses would produce a more truthful impression. But we must no longer be detained from the more immediate task before us. We must now follow Mr Ruskin to his second volume of _Modern Painters_, where he explains his theory of the beautiful; and although this will not be to readers in general the most attractive portion of his writings, and we ourselves have to practise some sort of self-denial in fixing our attention upon it, yet manifestly it is here that we must look for the basis or fundamental principles of all his criticisms in art. The order in which his works have been published was apparently deranged by a generous zeal, which could brook no delay, to defend Mr Turner from the censures of the undiscerning public. If the natural or systematic order had been preserved, the materials of this second volume would have formed the first preliminary treatise, determining those broad principles of taste, or that philosophical theory of the beautiful, on which the whole of the subsequent works were to be modelled. Perhaps this broken and reversed order of publication has not been unfortunate for the success of the author--perhaps it was dimly foreseen to be not altogether impolitic; for the popular ear was gained by the bold and enthusiastic defence of a great painter; and the ear of the public, once caught, may be detained by matter which, in the first instance, would have appealed to it in vain. Whether the effect of chance or design, we may certainly congratulate Mr Ruskin on the fortunate succession, and the fortunate rapidity with which his publications have struck on the public ear.