The designs for the _Rivers of France_ are conceived in a somewhat similar strain of lyrical abandonment to the sensuous charm of colour. Translated into mere black and white they leave us but half convinced. It is rather like a prose translation into a foreign language of the poetry of Victor Hugo, Swinburne or Shelley. To feel their full effect we must turn to the original water-colours, with all their ravishing intoxication of colour. It is as though our reason must needs be lulled asleep by the dominant flood of purely sensuous delight, before we can feel about these drawings as the artist would have us feel. We have seen, in the case of the ‘Stamford’ design in the _England and Wales_ series, that Turner’s interest in a place was specifically different from that of a resident or an historian. He cares little or nothing for local facts, merely as facts; his main concern is to skim off from the surface of observation a few telling points, a few heads of discourse as we might call them, which serve as a point of departure to his own abundant pictorial improvisation. The result may be more or less like the locality which furnishes the title of the drawing, but it is never in any strict sense of the word an accurate representation of the place. Yet the gulf that yawns between local fact and Turner’s lyrical inspiration is never of quite the same character in the English drawings as in the French. In both the gulf is wide, but in the English subjects the artist’s intimate knowledge of the general characteristics of the scenery gives such an air of plausibility to his improvisations that one might be tempted to explain his poetical licences as the result of an ardent striving after general and specific truth.[31] With the French drawings it is impossible to make such a mistake. Turner was not at all intimate with French scenery. He got up the subject in a most perfunctory manner in a few short and hurried tours. He merely paid a flying visit to the chief places mentioned in his guide-book and, instead of studying what he saw with a moderate degree of attention, was quite satisfied to look for mere hints of Turnerian phantasies; he did not want facts, but suggestions for pictorial inventions. So that in spite of his voluminous note-taking we find scarcely an accurate detail in the whole of the sixty engravings. The twin towers of Tancarville Castle are certainly the result of a misunderstanding of the hurried sketch made on the spot, and I have no doubt that the ‘errors’ and ‘inaccuracies’ so relentlessly ferreted out by Mr. Hamerton, in the representations of the Castle of Amboise, the towers of Notre Dame and St. Jacques de la Boucherie, the old Hôtel de Ville and the Pump, were caused in the same way. From the point of view of the topographer there can be no doubt that Hamerton’s statement[32] that the engravings of this series contain only ‘a sort of muddled reminiscence’ of the objects and places Turner had seen is in the main correct.