elaborately detailed; there are two
other ships of the line in the middle distance, drawn with equal
precision; a noble breezy sea dancing against their broad bows, full of
delicate drawing in its waves; a store-ship beneath the hull of the
larger vessel, and several other boats, and a complicated cloudy sky. It
might appear no small exertion of mind to draw the detail of all this
shipping down to the smallest ropes, from memory, in the drawing-room of
a mansion in the middle of Yorkshire, even if considerable time had been
given for the effort. But Mr. Fawkes sat beside the painter from the
first stroke to the last. Turner took a piece of blank paper one morning
after breakfast, outlined his ships, finished the drawing in three
hours, and went out to shoot.

221. Let this single fact be quietly meditated upon by our ordinary
painters, and they will see the truth of what was above asserted,--that
if a great thing can be done at all, it can be done easily; and let them
not torment themselves with twisting of compositions this way and that,
and repeating, and experimenting, and scene-shifting. If a man can
compose at all, he can compose at once, or rather he must compose in
spite of himself. And this is the reason of that silence which I have
kept in most of my works, on the subject of Composition. Many critics,
especially the architects, have found fault with me for not "teaching
people how to arrange masses;" for not "attributing sufficient
importance to composition." Alas! I attribute far more importance to it
than they do;--so much importance, that I should just as soon think of
sitting down to teach a man how to write a Divina Commedia, or King
Lear, as how to "compose," in the true sense, a single building or
picture. The marvelous stupidity of this age of lecturers is, that they
do not see that what they call, "principles of composition," are mere
principles of common sense in everything, as well as in pictures and
buildings;--A picture is to have a principal light? Yes; and so a dinner
is to have a principal dish, and an oration a principal point, and an
air of music a principal note, and every man a principal object. A
picture is to have harmony of relation among its parts? Yes; and so is a
speech well uttered, and an action well ordered, and a company well
chosen, and a ragout well mixed. Composition! As if a man were not
composing every moment of his life, well or ill, and would not do it
instinctively in his