at of the ordinary drawing masters of the time, grew more and
more refined and expressive, until it lost itself in a method of
execution often too delicate for the eye to follow, rendering, with a
precision before unexampled, both the texture and the form of every
object. The style may be considered as perfectly formed about the year
1800, and it remained unchanged for twenty years.

During that period the painter had attempted, and with more or less
success had rendered, every order of landscape subject, but always on
the same principle, subduing the colors of nature into a harmony of
which the key-notes are greyish green and brown; pure blues and delicate
golden yellows being admitted in small quantity, as the lowest and
highest limits of shade and light: and bright local colors in extremely
small quantity in figures or other minor accessories.

Pictures executed on such a system are not, properly speaking, works in
_color_ at all; they are studies of light and shade, in which both the
shade and the distance are rendered in the general hue which best
expresses their attributes of coolness and transparency; and the lights
and the foreground are executed in that which best expresses their
warmth and solidity. This advantage may just as well be taken as not, in
studies of light and shadow to be executed with the hand: but the use of
two, three, or four colors, always in the same relations and places,
does not in the least constitute the work a study of color, any more
than the brown engravings of the Liber Studiorum; nor would the idea of
color be in general more present to the artist's mind, when he was at
work on one of these drawings, than when he was using pure brown in the
mezzotint engraving. But the idea of space, warmth, and freshness being
not successfully expressible in a single tint, and perfectly expressible
by the admission of three or four, he allows himself this advantage when
it is possible, without in the least embarrassing himself with the
actual color of the objects to be represented. A stone in the fore
ground might in nature have been cold grey, but it will be drawn
nevertheless of a rich brown, because it is in the foreground; a hill in
the distance might in nature be purple with heath, or golden with furze;
but it will be drawn nevertheless of a cool grey, because it is in the
distance.

This at least was the general theory,--carried out with great severity
in many, both of the drawings and pictu