the young artist worked with a tradesmanlike industry and energy worthy of all praise. A silent, somewhat surly, uncommunicative young man, wandering over the country a sturdy humble traveller, on the top of stage-coaches, on foot with his bundle over his shoulder, filling his memory and his sketch-books with a thousand notes of the way; resting in the humblest wayside inns, living hardily, impatient of all the restraints of companionship, intent upon his work, always thrifty, taciturn, reserved, willing enough to learn other people's secrets, but jealous to extremity about his own. In London, where his friends and contemporaries had formed one of the friendly social coteries so usual among artists, meeting now and then at each other's houses, to sketch together in the pleasant interval between tea and supper, Turner declined to join them. The sketches were to be the property of the host of the evening, who supplied the materials; and that, and the necessity of working among his brethren, and possibly betraying some of his dear secrets, deterred the self-contained young man, whose heart, even at this early period of his life, does not seem to have been sufficiently liberal to bestow tea and bread and cheese on his own account. Had he been hospitably inclined, the mean paternal house, that bugbear to so many a youth of genius, had soon ceased to be his home. At twenty-five the young man was able to change the shabby atmosphere of Covent Garden for the solemn decorum of Harley Street; no small advance for an artist. Even Mr Thornbury seems unable to discover anything about these years except a record of work quite sufficient to show that public neglect never interfered with the daily bread of the laborious painter. Sturdily silent, supporting himself, as most men have had to do, with work secondary to the great work of his life, but in itself not disagreeable, and leaving him sufficient leisure to carry on his higher la

bours, and make all those experiments in colour which he communicated to nobody, and which produced such brilliant results in after years, there seems nothing specially distressing in his life. He was not poor; he was not without admiration from his fellows, and notice from the world without. His mind and time were alike fully occupied, and in a manner rather advantageous to his future fame than against it. He was, in fact, pursuing the study of his art under circumstances which nobody can call unfavourable, with few of the limits and restraints to which most men are subjected in the earlier stages of such a profession. In the year 1808 he became Professor of Perspective in the Academy, the highest honours of which, though Mr Thornbury gives no dates, he had no doubt already attained, and went to live in Hammersmith, where his house, according to the account of a friend, had "a garden sloping to the river, at the end of which was a summer-house. Here, out in the open air, were painted some of Turner's best pictures. It was here my father, who then resided at Kew, became first acquainted with him; and, expressing his surprise that Turner could paint under such circumstances, he remarked that lights and a room were absurdities, and that a picture could be painted anywhere. His eyes were remarkably strong. He would throw down his water-colour drawings on the floor of the summer-house, requesting my father not to touch them, as he could see them there, and they would be drying at the same time." Mr Thornbury conjectures that Turner's reason for seeking this suburban dwelling was, that he might be near De Loutherbourg, whom he admired, and out of whose house he was at last turned by that artist's suspicious wife, who imagined, and probably not without some truth, that the young painter was obtaining all her husband's secrets from him. One of Turner's humanest qualities seems to have

been his love for the river. The Thames runs through the scanty story of his life, sometimes gleaming fresh with a purity inalienable from youth, even in its least lovely developments; sometimes squalid and dismal, as it flows between the muddy banks and wretched houses, roughly picturesque and miserable, to which his eyes were turned in his last days.

There seems little to be said about this professorship; whether it was that his soul was too great for utterance, as his biographer would have us believe, or whether it was simple want of all faculty which could not find expression by means of brush and pigment, it is certain, and admitted, that words would not come to his service, however great his need. "When Turner lectured on perspective, he was often at a loss to find words to express the ideas he wished to communicate," says Mr Thornbury. "To aid his memory he would now and then copy out passages, which, when referred to, he could not clearly read. Sometimes he would not make his appearance at all, and the disappointed students were sent away with the excuse that he was either ill, or came from home without his lecture. . . . . Turner's want of expression rendered him almost useless as a Professor of Perspective, though he took great pains to prepare the most learned diagrams. He confessed that he knew much more of the art than he could explain. His sketch-books contain many drawings evidently made in preparation for these lectures. On one memorable occasion the hour had come for his lecture. The Professor arrived the buzz of the students subsided. The Professor mounts his desk-every eye is fixed on him and on his black board. But the Professor is uneasy-he is perturbed. He dives now into one pocket, now into the other-no! Now he begins, but what he says is, 'Gentlemen, I've been and left my lecture in the hackney-coach."" Mr Thornbury is good enough to inform us that,

when he could find utterance to his thoughts, "he soared as high above the common order of lecturers as he did in the regions of art," and that "his language was often elegant, his ideas original and most attractive;" but unfortunately no example of this rare eloquence has been preserved to the world; nor does his faculty of teaching seem to have improved since the time when, according to Mr Thornbury, "he was not going to let out guinea secrets for five shillings." Mr Ruskin himself describes this peculiar mode of instruction in the following words: "In teaching generally he would neither waste time nor spare it; he would look over a student's drawing at the Academy, point to a defective part, make a scratch on the paper at the side, say nothing. If the student saw what was wanted and did it, Turner was delighted; but if the student could not follow, Turner left him."

How long this professorship lasted we are not informed, but in 1812 he removed from Hammersmith to the well-known house in Queen Anne Street, which, so long as Turner is remembered at all, will be the only recognisable background for the singular figure, so often wondered over, so greatly praised, so greatly blamed, so rich, so famous, so squalid and miserable, of the greatest painter of his age. A year later he was able to add to this townhouse a residence in the country, and while using the great rooms in Queen Anne Street for a gallery, took up his abode with his old father at a little house in Twickenham, his own property, called at first, by a clumsy conceit, Solus Lodge, a name presumed by Mr Thornbury "to express his love of, or wish for solitude," but afterwards changed into Sandycombe Lodge by some suggestion of common sense. Up to this time an uninstructed observer would have some difficulty in discovering those evidences of public neglect and unappreciated. genius which are said to have soured "the great heart" of the

man. There is certainly little appearance of any noble or elevated aspect to his life, but after its homely fashion it is so steadily progressive, and shows so many vulgar symptoms of prosperity, that one could imagine his friends of conceptions less sublime than Mr Ruskin offering congratulations instead of condolences to the well-to-do painter. His life at Twickenham makes a distinct little vignette, perfectly clear and quaint enough. His father, whose humble occupation pleases Mr Thornbury's fancy so much, was now a retired barber, visiting his former clients and their wigs at rare intervals, and living with his son, to whom the old man seems to have been very serviceable. "The father and son lived in very friendly terms with one another,' says Mr Thornbury, "and the father attended to the gallery (in Queen Anne Street), showed in visitors, took care of the dinner, if he did not himself cook it. That he ever received the shillings at the door is, I believe, entirely untrue, though, had they been offered to him, I fear the temptation might have been too much for him to resist. Soon after Turner first went to Solus Lodge at Twickenham, his old father was met by a friend very disconsolate in Queen Anne Street. The expense of coming up daily to open the gallery was weighing on his heart. Life was embittered to him by the thought. A week after, the same friend met him again, gay, happy, and jumping up on his old toes; he asked him the reason of the sudden change in his spirits; he replied, 'Why, lookee here, I have found a way at last of coming up cheap from Twickenham to open my son's gallery. I found out the inn where the market-gardeners baited their horses; I made friends with one on 'em, and now for a glass of gin aday he brings me up in his cart on the top of his vegetables.'

Homely as this sketch is, it is by

no means out of keeping with the general aspect of the life at Twickenham. Mr Trimmer, whom Mr Thornbury describes as the eldest son of Turner's oldest friend, gives the following sketch of this extraordinary menage: "I have dined with him at Sandycombe Lodge, when my father happened to drop in too, in the middle of the day. Everything was of the most modest pretensionstwo-pronged forks, and knives with large round ends for taking up the food; not that I ever saw him so use them, though it is said to have been Dean Swift's mode of feeding himself. The table-cloth barely covered the table; the earthenware was in strict keeping. I remember his saying one day, 'Old Dad,' as he called his father, 'have you not any wine?' Whereupon Turner, senior, produced a bottle of currant, at which Turner, smelling, said, Why, what have you been about?' The senior, it seemed,had rather overdone it with hollands, and it was set aside. At this time Turner was a very abstemious person. I have dined with him in Queen Anne Street, where everything was of the same homely description. I should say that he never altered his style of living from his first start in Maiden Lane; not that I think him censurable for preferring the frugal meals of past times." Out of doors, however, things were better; the painter had a boat, in which he worked direct from nature; and also kept a gig, in which he was accustomed

to go out on sketching expeditions. Some gleams of redeeming light fall upon the picture as one perceives the artist in his boat painting skies and sunsets, and the willowy banks of Thames which he loved. It is almost the only time of his life which one cares to dwell upon. He had his little garden planted so thickly with willows that his father complained that it was a mere osier-bed; but the eye of the painter took pleasure in the drooping flexile boughs which

overshadowed his window. At the end of this same garden was a pond in which he cultivated water-lilies; and rude as was the interior and unrefined the inmates, a certain homely idyllic freshness lingers about the river-side cottage, with its willows, where Turner defended the blackbirds of the neighbourhood, and mused over the silent Thames angling or painting, and drove soberly about the country, finding those "bits" of landscape, undistinguished by the ignorant eye, in which all painters delight. He said," says Mr Trimmer, "if when out sketching you felt at a loss, you had only to turn round or walk a few paces farther, and you had what you wanted before you." Simple though the observation looks, no man who had not a certain amount of divine insight in his eyes could have made it.

This peaceful scene, however, the pleasantest glimpse we ever obtain of Turner's surroundings, was the background of a life full of equivocal circumstances. In the years which had elapsed since he left his native Covent Garden, he had painted some of his most notable pictures, most of which, however, bear the mark of distinct rivalry to one or other of the great masters with whose everrecurring names English amateurs and picture-collectors were wont to vex the souls of English painters. The first object of Turner's rivalry seems to have been Vandervelde, to whom, however, he appears to have borne no grudge. With a different and more spiteful feeling, however, the painter immediately after pitted himself against Claude, then the idol of the dilettante world. The results of this rivalry are sufficiently well known, and need no description here; but, not content with the pictures by means of which the jealous painter had set his heart upon pursuing Claude to the judgment of posterity, with opposition as intense as if it had been a visible rival, and not a name against which he contended, another method of confronting this chosen rival oc

curred to Turner. One of Mr Thornbury's informants declares the suggestion of the Liber Studiorum to have come from her father, a Mr Wells, then a drawing-master at Addiscombe, in whose house Turner was familiar. Not to throw any doubt on the word of a contemporary and a lady, Turner's mind does not seem to have been one which took kindly to other people's suggestions; but however that might be, the Liber Studiorum was planned and came into being within the first sixteen years of this century. While the painter delivered, or made a pretence of delivering, inarticulate perspective lectures, and while he studied his beloved river at Hammersmith and at Twickenham, those matchless sketches were being made; while at the same time arrangements not the most creditable in the world were also making for their conveyance to the public eye. The drawings themselves were doubtless the easiest, as they were certainly the most satisfactory, part of the transaction. The history of the Liber Studiorum is one of incessant squabbles with engravers, and hard exaction on the part of the painter, of the bond into which these necessary assistants had unwittingly entered. Charles Turner, after engraving the first twenty plates, with all the corrections and additions made to them, for eight guineas each, struck work upon the twenty-first, and declined to proceed further except with the modest addition of two guineas a plate. "The painter," says Mr Thornbury, "who had never had quarter given to him while he was struggling, now in his turn gave no quarter." This assertion may be true or not, but Mr Thornbury certainly gives us no proof of it. It is true, however, that no consideration for the engraver moved Turner's angry soul; he and his namesake quarrelled, separated, and did not speak again for nineteen years. A multiplicity of other engravers were employed to complete the work, which, though nowadays worth any price, did not

at the moment pay. Quarrels with engravers, however, were not the only remarkable circumstances in the story. When the plates had been made, Turner handled them with the skill of a cunning old shopkeeper, craftily making the utmost penny of a damaged stock. He watched over them in their old age, as the cottar's wife watched over the defective wardrobe of her family, reshaping, retouching, and renewing the old plates till they looked "a'maist as weel's the new.' This operation, however, we will allow Mr Thornbury to describe in his own words:

Generally speaking, the alterations were made with consummate art, merely

to hide the tear and wear of the copper,

the faintness, the blur, or the pallor of the plate's old age. It would have bordered slightly on sharp practice, had it not been for the vigour of Turner's inventive genius. Out of these very defects he devised new beauties. These crafty tradesmanlike alterations, which, when studied, are the strongest proof I know of his genius and of his thriftiness, were made under his own eye, if not by his own hand.

"These variations,' says Mr Dillon, who possesses a superb collection of the etchings, render it extremely difficult to form a complete set of the first impressions of the Liber; it appears that no set, at the time when it was issued, contained all the plates in the first state, or indeed in any one similar state; on the contrary, in the original numbers, a very early and fine impression of one plate will be found in company with very fate and bad impressions of another plate, as if one had been given with a rude sense of justice, as a sort of compensation for the others.'

"I am sorry, too, to say that there can be no doubt, from years of investi gation by Messrs Pye, Stokes, and other collectors, that Turner often took out the thickened letters of the plates in the bad thick state, and engraved open letters higher up in the plate-in fact, he sold sham proofs, having private marks and scratches to indicate to himself the various states.

"I would not press the charge so severely as I perhaps ought, because Turner is dead, and there is no one to defend him. The only defence I can set up for him is, that it is possible that he considered that the entire change of

the effect in the later states-the harmony being still as perfect as before-really made them new works. The new idea, and the strain on a new portion of the copper, Turner perhaps, with his entangled logic, thought equivalent to a new thought, which he had no idea of selling for the ordinary price."

Such an episode somewhat mars the tranquil effect of the Twickenham landscape; yet, notwithstanding, this rural residence is the least disagreeable portion of Turner's life. He had friends about him who liked him, and whom, after his fashion, he liked; foremost among whom was the country clergyman and amateur artist, Mr Trimmer, whose son's recollections have been already quoted. This gentleman's wife made herself memorable by the wonderful feat of extorting from the painter two little drawings, being almost the only instance upon record in which he is known to have given away any of his works, however slight. The nation, it is true, has been the final gainer; but it is difficult to understand how the very warm interest in posterity which is supposed to have inspired Turner, can be held consistent with the wasteful recklessness of accumulation in which he delighted; and which, in all probability, but for the existence of such an out-and-out adorer as Mr Ruskin, ready to spend time and care upon the tedious work of arrangement, would have made those hoards entirely useless to the world.

He left Twickenham in 1826, his father having died, to settle in the old house in Queen Anne Street, which is fresh in everybody's memory. The death of his father, the only visible link of nature which he had in the world, seems to have had no small effect upon the life whose rude and dreary household economy was thus broken up for ever. to this period the shades of the picture are only obscure with natural shabbiness and personal insignificance. If darker depths lay below, they are kept out of sight. A thrifty, hardworking, uneducated, and taci

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