APPENDIX, 11 435

de’ Saraceni, per fabbricarsi un Palazzo presso di Babilonia, aveva ordinato che dalle Chiese de’ Cristiani si togliessero i più scelti marmi;” and that the Venetians, “videro sotto i loro occhi flagellarsi crudelmente un Cristiano per aver infranto un marmo.” I heartily wish that the same kind of punishment were enforced to this day, for the same sin.

11. P. 45.-RENAISSANCE LANDSCAPE

I an glad here to re-assert opinions which it has grieved me to be suspected of having changed. The calmer tone of the second volume of Modern Painters as compared with the first, induced, I believe, this suspicion, very justifiably, in the minds of many of its readers. The difference resulted, however, from the simple fact, that the first was written in great haste and indignation, for a special purpose and time;-the second, after I had got engaged, almost unawares, in inquiries which could not be hastily nor indignantly pursued: my opinions remaining then, and remaining now, altogether unchanged on the subject which led me into the discussion.¹ And that no farther doubt of them may be entertained by any who may think them worth questioning, I shall here, once for all, express them in the plainest and fewest words I can. I think that J. M. W. Turner is not only the greatest (professed) landscape painter who ever lived, but that he has in him as much as would have furnished all the rest with such power as they had; and that, if we put Nicolas Poussin, Salvator, and our own Gainsborough out of the group, he would cut up into Claudes, Cuyps, Ruysdaels, and such others, by uncounted bunches. I hope this is plainly and strongly enough stated. And farther, I like his later pictures, up to the year 1845, the best; and believe that those persons who only like his early pictures, do not, in fact, like him at all. They do not like that which is essentially his.² They like that in which he resembles other men; which he had learned from Loutherbourg, Claude, or Wilson: that which is indeed his own, they do not care for. Not that there is not much of his own in his early works; they are all invaluable in their way; but those persons who can find no beauty in his strangest fantasy on the Academy walls, cannot distinguish the peculiarly Turneresque characters of the earlier pictures. And, therefore, I again state here, that I think his pictures painted between the years 1830 and 1845 his greatest; and that his entire power is best represented by such pictures as the Temeraire, the Sun of Venice going to Sea, and others, painted exactly at the time when the public and the press were together loudest in abuse of him.

I desire, however, the reader to observe that I said above professed landscape painters, among whom, perhaps, I should hardly have put Gainsborough.

¹ [On this subject see Vol. III. pp. xxxiii., 53, 630, 654.]

² [See again Vol. III. p. 654. For this passage-“and believe ... essentially his”-the MS. reads:-

“and that nothing annoys me more in a small way than having it said to me, as it is generally about once a day by some one or other desiring to be courteous to me, that they ‘like Turner’s early pictures, but really cannot understand his later ones.’ For this is all one in my mind as if they said they did not like him at all. In fact they do not like Him. They like that in which he resembles other men, decent, straightforward, prosy painting. Any-thing of His own they do not care for.”]

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