eldest boy, like every one else, has
taken his chief treasure with him, and this treasure is his pet dog. It
is a little sharp-nosed white fox-terrier, full of fire and life; but
not strong enough for a long walk. So little Gershom, whose name was
"the stranger" because his father had been a stranger in a strange
land,--little Gershom carries his white terrier under his arm, lying on
the top of a large bundle to make it comfortable. The doggie puts its
sharp nose and bright eyes out, above his hand, with a little roguish
gleam sideways in them, which means,--if I can read rightly a dog's
expression,--that he has been barking at Moses all the morning and has
nearly put him out of temper:--and without any doubt, I can assert to
you that there is not any other such piece of animal painting in the
world,--so brief, intense, vivid, and absolutely balanced in truth: as
tenderly drawn as if it had been a saint, yet as humorously as
Landseer's Lord Chancellor poodle.

258. Oppose to--

Holbein's Veracity--Botticelli's Fantasy.
" Shade " Color.
" Despair " Faith.
" Grossness " Purity.

True Fantasy. Botticelli's Tree in Hellespontic Sibyl. Not a real tree
at all--yet founded on intensest perception of beautiful reality. So the
swan of Clio, as opposed to Duerer's cock, or to Turner's swan.

The Italian power of abstraction into one mythologic
personage--Holbein's death is only literal. He has to split his death
into thirty different deaths; and each is but a skeleton. But Orcagna's
death is one--the power of death itself. There may thus be as much
_breadth in thought_, as in execution.

* * * * *

259. What then, we have to ask, is a man _conscious of_ in what he sees?

For instance, in all Cruikshank's etchings--however slight the
outline--there is an intense consciousness of light and shade, and of
local color, _as a part_ of light and shade; but none of color itself.
He was wholly incapable of coloring; and perhaps this very deficiency
enabled him to give graphic harmony to engraving.

* * * * *

Bewick--snow-pieces, etc. _Gray_ predominant; _perfect sense of color_,
coming out in patterns of birds;--yet so uncultivated, that he engraves
the brown birds better than pheasant or peacock!

For quite perfect consciousness of color makes engraving impossible, and
you have instead--Correg