is was by chance, or that the
modes of mountain drawing at the period would in any wise have helped
Turner to discover these lines. The aiguilles had been drawn before this
time, and the figure on the left in Plate +32+ will show how. It is a
facsimile of a piece of an engraving of the Mer de Glace, by Woollett,
after William Pars, published in 1783, and founded on the general
Wilsonian and Claudesque principles of landscape common at the time.
There are, in the rest of the plate, some good arrangements of shadow
and true aerial perspective; and the piece I have copied, which is an
attempt to represent the Aiguille Dru, opposite the Charmoz, will serve,
not unfairly, to show how totally inadequate the draughtsmen of the time
were to perceive the character of mountains, and, also, how unable the
human mind is by itself to conceive anything like the variety of natural
form. The workman had not looked at the thing,--trusted to his "Ideal,"
supposed that broken and rugged rocks might be shaped better out of his
own head than by Nature's laws,--and we see what comes of it.

Sec. 24. And now, lastly, observe, in the laws by which this strange
curvilinear structure is given to the aiguilles, how the provision for
beauty of form is made in the first landscape materials we have to
study. We have permitted ourselves, according to that unsystematic mode
of proceeding pleaded for in the opening of our present task, to wander
hither and thither as this or that question rose before us, and
demanded, or tempted, our pursuit. But the reader must yet remember that
our special business in this section of the work is the observance of
the nature of _beauty_, and of the degrees in which the aspect of any
object fulfils the laws of beauty stated in the second volume. Now in
the fifteenth paragraph of the chapter on infinity, it was stated that
curvature was essential to all beauty, and that what we should "need
more especially to prove, was the constancy of curvature in all natural
forms whatsoever." And these aiguilles, which are the first objects we
have had definitely to consider, appeared as little likely to fulfil the
condition as anything we could have come upon. I am well assured that
the majority of spectators see no curves in them at all, but an
intensely upright, stern, spiry ruggedness and angularity. And we might
even beforehand have been led to expect, and to be contented in
expecting, nothing else from them than this; for since