And _Blackwood's Magazine_, which the Ruskins, as Edinburgh people and admirers of Christopher North, read with respect, spoke about Turner, in a review of the picture-season, with that freedom of speech which Scotch reviewers claim as a heritage from the days of Jeffrey.

Young Ruskin at once dashed off an answer.
The critic had found that Turner was "out of nature"; Ruskin tried to show that the pictures were full of facts, but treated with poetical license.

The critic pronounced Turner's colour bad, his execution neglected, and his chiaroscuro childish; in answer to which Ruskin explained that Turner's reasoned system was to represent light and shade by the contrast of warm and cold colour, rather than by the opposition of white and black which other painters used.

He denied that his execution was other than his aims necessitated, and maintained that the 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....