critic had no right to force his cut-and-dried academic rules of
composition on a great genius; at the same time admitting that:


"The faults of Turner are numerous, and perhaps more egregious than
those of any other great existing artist; but if he has greater
faults, he has also greater beauties.

"His imagination is Shakespearian in its mightiness. Had the scene
of 'Juliet and her Nurse' risen up before the mind of a poet, and
been described in 'words that burn,' it had been the admiration of
the world.... Many-coloured mists are floating above the distant
city, but such mists as you might imagine to be ethereal spirits,
souls of the mighty dead breathed out of the tombs of Italy into
the blue of her bright heaven, and wandering in vague and infinite
glory around the earth that they have loved. Instinct with the
beauty of uncertain light, they move and mingle among the pale
stars, and rise up into the brightness of the illimitable heaven,
whose soft, sad blue eye gazes down into the deep waters of the sea
for ever--that sea whose motionless and silent transparency is
beaming with phosphor light, that emanates out of its sapphire
serenity like bright dreams breathed into the spirit of a deep
sleep. And the spires of the glorious city rise indistinctly bright
into those living mists, like pyramids of pale fire from some vast
altar; and amidst the glory of the dream there is, as it were, the
voice of a multitude entering by the eye, arising from the
stillness of the city like the summer wind passing over the leaves
of the forest, when a murmur is heard amidst their multitudes.

"This, O Maga, is the picture which your critic has pronounced to