Absolutely well no cloud _can_ be drawn with the point; nothing but the most delicate management of the brush will express its variety of edge and texture. By laborious and tender engraving, a close approximation may be obtained either to nature or to good painting; and the engravings of sky by our modern line engravers are often admirable;--in many respects as good as can be, and to my mind the best part of their work. There still exist some early proofs of Miller's plate of the Grand Canal, Venice, in which the sky is the likest thing to Turner's work I have ever seen in large engravings. The plate was spoiled after a few impressions were taken off by desire of the publisher. The sky was so exactly like Turner's that he thought it would not please the public, and had all the fine cloud-drawing rubbed away to make it soft. The Plate opposite page 118, by Mr. Armytage, is also, I think, a superb specimen of engraving, though in result not so good as the one just spoken of, because this was done from my copy of Turner's sky, not from the picture itself. But engraving of this finished kind cannot, by reason of its costliness, be given for every illustration of cloud form. Nor, if it could, can skies be sketched with the completion which would bear it. It is sometimes possible to draw one cloud out of fifty thousand with something like fidelity before it fades. But if we want the arrangement of the fifty thousand, they can only be indicated with the rudest lines, and finished from memory. It was, as we shall see presently, only by his gigantic powers of memory that Turner was enabled to draw skies as he did. Now, I look upon my own memory of clouds, or of anything else, as of no value whatever. All the drawings on which I have ever rested an assertion have been made without stirring from the spot; and in sketching clouds from nature, it is very seldom desirable to use the brush. For broad effects and notes of color (though these, hastily made, are always inaccurate, and letters indicating the color do nearly as well) the brush may be sometimes useful, but, in most cases, a dark pencil, which will lay shade with its side and draw lines with its point, is the best instrument. Turner almost always outlined merely with the point, being able to remember the relations of shade without the slightest chance of error. The point, at all events, is needful, however much stump work may be added to it.