the AEsacus and Hesperie was wrought out with
the greatest possible care; and the principal branch on the near tree is
etched as in Fig. 26. The work looks at first like a scholar's instead
of a master's; but when the light and shade are added, every touch falls
into its place, and a perfect expression of grace and complexity
results. Nay even before the light and shade are added, you ought to be
able to see that these irregular and broken lines, especially where the
expression is given of the way the stem loses itself in the leaves, are
more true than the monotonous though graceful leaf-drawing which, before
Turner's time, had been employed, even by the best masters, in their
distant masses. Fig. 27. is sufficiently characteristic of the manner of
the old woodcuts after Titian; in which, you see, the leaves are too
much of one shape, like bunches of fruit; and the boughs too completely
seen, besides being somewhat soft and leathery in aspect, owing to the
want of angles in their outline. By great men like Titian, this somewhat
conventional structure was only given in haste to distant masses; and
their exquisite delineation of the foreground, kept their
conventionalism from degeneracy: but in the drawing of the Caracci and
other derivative masters, the conventionalism prevails everywhere, and
sinks gradually into scrawled work, like Fig. 28., about the worst which
it is possible to get into the habit of using, though an ignorant person
might perhaps suppose it more "free," and therefore better than Fig. 26.
Note, also, that in noble outline drawing, it does not follow that a
bough is wrongly drawn, because it looks contracted unnaturally
somewhere, as in Fig. 26., just above the foliage. Very often the
muscular action which is to be expressed by the line, runs into the
_middle_ of the branch, and the actual outline of the branch at that
place may be dimly seen, or not at all; and it is then only by the
future shade that its actual shape, or the cause of its disappearance,
will be indicated.

[Illustration: FIG. 28.]

One point more remains to be noted about trees, and I have done. In the
minds of our ordinary water-colour artists, a distant tree seems only to
be conceived as a flat green blot, grouping pleasantly with other
masses, and giving cool colour to the landscape, but differing nowise,
in _texture_, from the blots of other shapes, which these painters use
to express stones, or water, or figures. But as soon as