's color are found in pictures of this class;
in one or two instances he has broken through the conventional rules,
and then is always fine, as in the Hero and Leander; but in general the
picture rises in value as it approaches to a view, as the Fountain of
Fallacy, a piece of rich northern Italy, with some fairy waterworks;
this picture was unrivalled in color once, but is now a mere wreck. So
the Rape of Proserpine, though it is singular that in his Academy
pictures even his simplicity fails of reaching ideality; in this picture
of Proserpine the nature is not the grand nature of all time, it is
indubitably modern,[14] and we are perfectly electrified at anybody's
being carried away in the corner except by people with spiky hats and
carabines. This is traceable to several causes; partly to the want of
any grand specific form, partly to the too evident middle-age character
of the ruins crowning the hills, and to a multiplicity of minor causes
which we cannot at present enter into.

Sec. 43. His views of Italy destroyed by brilliancy and redundant quantity.

Neither in his actual views of Italy has Turner ever caught her true
spirit, except in the little vignettes to Rogers's Poems. The Villa of
Galileo, the nameless composition with stone pines, the several villa
moonlights, and the convent compositions in the Voyage of Columbus, are
altogether exquisite; but this is owing chiefly to their simplicity and
perhaps in some measure to their smallness of size. None of his large
pictures at all equal them; the Bay of Baiae is encumbered with
material, it contains ten times as much as is necessary to a good
picture, and yet is so crude in color as to look unfinished. The
Palestrina is fall of raw white, and has a look of Hampton Court about
its long avenue; the modern Italy is purely English in its near foliage;
it is composed from Tivoli material enriched and arranged most
dexterously, but it has the look of a rich arrangement, and not the
virtue of the real thing. The early Tivoli, a large drawing taken from
below the falls, was as little true, and still less fortunate, the trees
there being altogether affected and artificial. The Florence engraved in
the Keepsake is a glorious drawing, as far as regards the passage with
the bridge and sunlight on the Arno, the Cascine foliage, and distant
plain, and the towers of the fortress on the left; but the details of
the duomo and the city are entirely missed, and with them the ma