k. It would have required the greatest
care, and prolonged labor, to give uncaricatured representations of
Salvator's painting, or of any other work depending on the free dashes
of the brush, so as neither to mend nor mar it. Perhaps in the next
volume I may give one or two examples associated with vegetation; but in
general, I shall be content with directing the reader's attention to the
facts in nature, and in Turner; leaving him to carry out for himself
whatever comparisons he may judge expedient.

I am afraid, also, that disappointment may be felt at not finding plates
of more complete subject illustrating these chapters on mountain beauty.
But the analysis into which I had to enter required the dissection of
drawings, rather than their complete presentation; while, also, on the
scale of any readable page, no effective presentation of large drawings
could be given. Even my vignette, the frontispiece to the third volume,
is partly spoiled by having too little white paper about it; and the
fiftieth plate, from Turner's Goldau, necessarily omits, owing to its
reduction, half the refinements of the foreground. It is quite waste of
time and cost to reduce Turner's drawings at all; and I therefore
consider these volumes only as _Guides_ to them, hoping hereafter to
illustrate some of the best on their own scale.

Several of the plates appear, in their present position, nearly
unnecessary; +14+ and +15+, for instance, in Vol. III. These are
illustrations of the chapters on the Firmament in the fifth volume; but
I should have had the plates disproportionately crowded at last, if I
had put all that it needed in that volume; and as these two bear
somewhat on various matters spoken of in the third, I placed them where
they are first alluded to. The frontispiece has chief reference to the
same chapters; but seemed, in its three divisions, properly introductory
to our whole subject. It is a simple sketch from nature, taken at sunset
from the hills near Como, some two miles up the eastern side of the lake
and about a thousand feet above it, looking towards Lugano. The sky is a
little too heavy for the advantage of the landscape below; but I am not
answerable for the sky. It was _there_.[A]

In the multitudinous letterings and references of this volume there may
possibly be one or two awkward errata; but not so many as to make it
necessary to delay the volume while I look it over again in search of
them. The reader will perhaps