their toe-nails, not the _old_ ones) proves nothing
respecting the origination of Art's highest liberty. In the first place,
the man who was selected by the Elisha to be the Elijah of the school
would under no circumstances have chosen a fiery chariot to go up in,
but would have taken the Lord Mayor's coach, (if he could have got it
without paying,) and, like a true Englishman, been preceded by heralds,
and after-run by lackeys. The idea of Turner _en martyre_ is to a calm
spectator simply amusing. If "a neglected disciple of Truth" had met him
out a-sketching, and asked him for help, or a peep, he would have shut
up his book with a slap, and said, like the celebrated laird, "_Puir
bodie! fin' a penny for yer ain sel'_." In the second place, this Elijah
never dropped his mantle on the _soi-disant_ Elisha. Search over the
whole range of walls where (with their color somewhat the worse for
time) Turner's pictures are preserved, and if any critic but Ruskin's
self can find the qualities which unite Turner with modern
pre-Raphaelism, we will buy the view of Koeln and make it a present to
him. In the third place, apart from all ancestry or indorsement, we
regard modern pre-Raphaelism, as a school full of vital mistakes. It
refuses to acknowledge this preeminent, eternal fact of Art, _that the
entire truth of Nature cannot be copied_: in other words and larger,
that the artist must select between the major and the minor facts of the
outer world; that, before he executes, he must pronounce whether he will
embody the essential effect, that which steals on the soul and possesses
it without painful analysis, or the separate details which belong to the
geometrician and destroy the effect,--still further, whether he will
make us feel what Nature says, or examine below her voice into the
vibration of the _chordae vocales_.

We have not touched on pre-Raphaelism with the idea of attacking it,
still less of defending it, and not at all of discussing it. Our view
has been simply to excuse the assertion that with America has begun,
must necessarily begin and belong, the enfranchisement of Art from
subservience to a type,--the opening of its doors into the open air of
aesthetic catholicity.

Years ago, the writer in several places presented to the consideration
of American Art-lovers the plaster bust of "The Old Trapper," as one of
the foremost things which up to that period had been done by any man for
such enfranchisement as that refe