I have not thought it worth while at present to enter into any examination of the construction of Turner's color system, because the public is at present so unconscious of the meaning and nature of color that they would not know what I was talking of. The more than ludicrous folly of the system of modern water-color painting, in which it is assumed that every hue in the drawing may be beneficially washed into every other, must prevent, as long as it influences the popular mind, even incipient inquiry respecting color-art. But for help of any solitary and painstaking student, it may be noted that Turner's color is founded more on Correggio and Bassano than on the central Venetians; it involves a more tender and constant reference to light and shade than that of Veronese; and a more sparkling and gem-like lustre than that of Titian. I dislike using a technical word which has been disgraced by affectation, but there is no other word to signify what I mean in saying that Turner's color has, to the full, Correggio's "morbidezza," including also, in due place, conditions of mosaic effect, like that of the colors in an Indian design, unaccomplished by any previous master in painting; and a fantasy of inventive arrangement corresponding to that of Beethoven in music. In its concurrence with and expression of texture or construction of surfaces (as their bloom, lustre, or intricacy) it stands unrivalled--no still-life painting by any other master can stand for an instant beside Turner's, when his work is of life-size, as in his numerous studies of birds and their plumage. This "morbidezza" of color is associated, precisely as it was in Correggio, with an exquisite sensibility to fineness and intricacy of curvature: curvature, as already noticed in the second volume, being to lines what gradation is to colors. This subject, also, is too difficult and too little regarded by the public, to be entered upon here, but it must be observed that this quality of Turner's design, the one which of all is best expressible by engraving, has of all been least expressed, owing to the constant reduction or change of proportion in the plates. Publishers, of course, require generally their plates to be of one size (the plates in this book form an appalling exception to received practice in this respect); Turner always made his drawings longer or shorter by half an inch, or more, according to the subject; the engravers contracted or expanded them to fit the books, with utter destruction of the nature of every curve in the design. Mere reduction necessarily involves such loss to some extent; but the degree in which it probably involves it has been curiously exemplified by the 61st Plate in this volume, reduced from a pen-drawing of mine, 18 inches long. Fig. 101 is a facsimile of the