it--the ruthless display the artists make of their special knowledge of the construction and rigging of their vessels. I believe Turner’s knowledge of this kind was almost as exhaustive as theirs, but whether as full or more limited, he made a better use of what he did know. His objects are never there simply for themselves. They are always subordinated to a genuinely imaginative conception. His pictures, therefore, are not the work of a man with a professional speciality. They are real epics of the sea. From their own imaginative point of view their workmanship is almost perfect. Their style is sonorous and weighty. They are as solemn and majestic in conception as they are manly in feeling. They have something of that ‘beauty which, as Milton sings, hath terror in it.’ Together ‘they move in perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood’--the noblest sequence of poems ever dedicated to the majesty of the sea. When we compare such pictures as these with a subject like ‘The Death of Nelson,’ in the National Gallery,--a subject dealing directly with a particular historical incident--we cannot but feel that they owe something of their loftiness and grandeur to their exaltation above all merely limited feelings of patriotism. I suppose a Frenchman could hardly be expected to look at the ‘Nelson’ with quite the same feelings as an Englishman; or a Dane to regard the ‘Spithead; Boat’s crew recovering an anchor’--which actually represents the return of the English fleet with the Danish ships captured at Copenhagen--in the way this event was hailed in England. The feeling of patriotism is no doubt an admirable and useful one in real life; but in so far as art is tied down to the service of a particular kind of patriotism, it is limited to this definite end, and is not entirely free in and for itself. And art which is not entirely free from all finite ends cannot rise to the full height of its own destiny.