practise, in this way, more and more complicated pieces of bough and
leafage, till you find you can master the most difficult arrangements,
not consisting of more than ten or twelve leaves. You will find as you
do this, if you have an opportunity of visiting any gallery of pictures,
that you take a much more lively interest than before in the work of the
great masters; you will see that very often their best backgrounds are
composed of little more than a few sprays of leafage, carefully studied,
brought against the distant sky; and that another wreath or two form the
chief interest of their foregrounds. If you live in London you may test
your progress _accurately_ by the degree of admiration you feel for the
leaves of vine round the head of the Bacchus, in Titian's Bacchus and
Ariadne. All this, however, will not enable you to draw a mass of
foliage. You will find, on looking at any rich piece of vegetation, that
it is only one or two of the nearer clusters that you can by any
possibility draw in this complete manner. The mass is too vast, and too
intricate, to be thus dealt with.

[Illustration: FIG. 7. a b c]

You must now therefore have recourse to some confused mode of execution,
capable of expressing the confusion of Nature. And, first, you must
understand what the character of that confusion is. If you look
carefully at the outer sprays of any tree at twenty or thirty yards'
distance, you will see them defined against the sky in masses, which, at
first, look quite definite; but if you examine them, you will see,
mingled with the real shapes of leaves, many indistinct lines, which
are, some of them, stalks of leaves, and some, leaves seen with the edge
turned towards you, and coming into sight in a broken way; for,
supposing the real leaf shape to be as at _a_, Fig. 7., this, when
removed some yards from the eye, will appear dark against the sky, as at
_b_; then, when removed some yards farther still, the stalk and point
disappear altogether, the middle of the leaf becomes little more than a
line; and the result is the condition at _c_, only with this farther
subtlety in the look of it, inexpressible in the woodcut, that the stalk
and point of the leaf, though they have disappeared to the eye, have yet
some influence in _checking the light_ at the places where they exist,
and cause a slight dimness about the part of the leaf which remains
visible, so that its perfect effect could only be rendered by two layers
of