We here allude particularly to Turner, the ablest landscape painter now living, whose pictures are, however, too much abstractions of aerial perspective, and representations not so properly of the objects of nature as of the medium through which they are seen. They are the triumph of the knowledge of the artist, and of the power of the pencil over the barrenness of the subject. They are pictures of the elements of air, earth, and water. The artist delights to go back to the first chaos of the world, or to that state of things when the waters were separated from the dry land, and light from darkness, but as yet no living thing nor tree bearing fruit was seen upon the face of the earth. All is ‘without form and void.’ Some one said of his landscapes that they were _pictures of nothing, and very like_. Footnote 52: Raphael not only could not paint a landscape; he could not paint people in a landscape. He could not have painted the heads or the figures, or even the dresses, of the St. Peter Martyr. His figures have always an _in-door_ look, that is, a set, determined, voluntary, dramatic character, arising from their own passions, or a watchfulness of those of others, and want that wild uncertainty of expression, which is connected with the accidents of nature and the changes of the elements. He has nothing _romantic_ about him. Footnote 53: A good-natured man will always have a smack of pedantry about him. A lawyer, who talks about law, _certioraris_, _noli prosequis_, and silk gowns, though he may be a blockhead, is by no means dangerous. It is a very bad sign (unless where it arises from singular modesty) when you cannot tell a man’s profession from his conversation. Such persons either feel no interest in what concerns them most, or do not express what they feel. ‘Not to admire any thing’ is a very unsafe rule. A London apprentice, who did not admire the Lord Mayor’s coach, would stand a good chance of being hanged. We know but one person absurd enough to have formed his whole character on the above maxim of Horace, and who affects a superiority over others from an uncommon degree of natural and artificial stupidity. Footnote 54: ‘Je crois que l’imagination étoit la première de ses facultés, et qu’elle absorboit même toutes les autres.’—P. 80. Footnote 55: ‘Il avoit une grande puissance de raison sur les matieres abstraites, sur les objets qui n’ont de réalité que dans la pensée,’ etc.—P. 81. Footnote 56: He did more towards the French Revolution than any other man. Voltaire, by his wit and penetration, had rendered superstition contemptible, and tyranny odious: but it was Rousseau who brought the feeling of irreconcilable enmity to rank and privileges, _above humanity_, home to the bosom of every man,—identified it with all the pride of intellect, and with the deepest yearnings of the human heart. Footnote 57: