_ rightly."

[26] Hardly. It would have been so only had the recently finished
foregrounds been as accurate in detail as they are abundant: they
are painful, I believe, not from their finish, but their falseness.

CHAPTER V.

OF TRUTH OF SPACE:--SECONDLY, AS ITS APPEARANCE IS DEPENDENT ON
THE POWER OF THE EYE.

Sec. 1. The peculiar indistinctness dependent on the retirement of objects
from the eye.

In the last chapter, we have seen how indistinctness of individual
distances becomes necessary in order to express the adaptation of the
eye to one or other of them; we have now to examine that kind of
indistinctness which is dependent on real retirement of the object even
when the focus of the eye is fully concentrated upon it. The first kind
of indecision is that which belongs to all objects which the eye is not
adapted to, whether near or far off: the second is that consequent upon
the want of power in the eye to receive a clear image of objects at a
great distance from it, however attentively it may regard them.

Draw on a piece of white paper, a square and a circle, each about a
twelfth or eighth of an inch in diameter, and blacken them so that their
forms may be very distinct; place your paper against the wall at the end
of the room, and retire from it a greater or less distance according as
you have drawn the figures larger or smaller. You will come to a point
where, though you can see both the spots with perfect plainness, you
cannot tell which is the square and which the circle.

Sec. 2. Causes confusion, but not annihilation of details.

Now this takes place of course with every object in a landscape, in
proportion to its distance and size. The definite forms of the leaves of
a tree, however sharply and separately they may appear to come against
the sky, are quite indistinguishable at fifty yards off, and the form of
everything becomes confused before we finally lose sight of it. Now if
the character of an object, say the front of a house, be explained by a
variety of forms in it, as the shadows in the tops of the windows, the
lines of the architraves, the seams of the masonry, etc.; these lesser
details, as the object falls into distance, become confused and
undecided, each of them losing their definite forms, but all being
perfectly visible as something, a white or a dark spot or stroke, not
lost sight of, observ