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ment to mark the grave of his friend and rival in Covent-garden churchyard; but when the amount was named-a few shillings over ten pounds-he shrugged his shoulders, and rested satisfied with the bare intention. The grave, we are sorry to say, is still unmarked; a headstone to Girtin would be a graceful tribute from either the Old or the New Water-colour Society." Now all this is just an instance of the way men write when they are determined to blame. A tombstone was put up to Girtin, but whether by Turner or not, I do not know. A friend of mine saw it, made a sketch of it, and warned the sexton of its precarious state. It has now been removed.

CHAPTER VIII.

TURNER, THE DRAWING-MASTER.

THERE are old people still living who remember Turner in 1795 or 1796-that is to say, when he was twenty or twenty-one, and taught drawing in London, at Hadley (Herts), and at other places. One of them writes to me, and says-" He was eccentric, but kind and amusing." He was too reserved, and too tonguetied to be able to teach what he knew, even if he had cared to disclose his hard-earned secrets. He would hate the work, though it did bring some ten shillings a lesson. His ambition would feel impatient of amateurs. He would not flatter like the ordinary time-server who teaches. He would be silent and rough, and leave the puzzled pupils pretty well alone while he thought over some sketch of his own. Indeed, Turner always held that those who could not understand a hint would not understand a volume of advice. Blake, one of his pupils, complained of being left quite alone, and one day, indignant at his master's heedlessness of some commissions for drawings he had obtained for him, went and rubbed out the addresses he had already given, and so cancelled the orders. I have no doubt Turner's disregard of the commissions

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meant something, and that he took the cancelling quietly and as a matter of course.

But now we are discussing Turner's life as a drawing-master, let us consider the nature of the art he taught, and the various improvements he introduced into that art.

On the interesting question of Turner's method of water-colour painting, our greatest authority, Mr. Ruskin, says: "The large early drawings of Turner were sponged without friction, or were finished piece by piece on white paper; as he advanced he laid the chief masses first in broad tints, never effacing anything, but working the details over these broad tints. While still wet, he brought out the soft lights with the point of a brush; the brighter ones with the end of a stick, often, too, driving the wet colour in a darker line to the edge of the light, in order to represent the outlines of hills.

"His touches were all clear, firm, and unalterable, one over the other: friction he used only now and then, to represent the grit of stone or the fretted pile of moss; the finer lights he often left from the first, even the minutest light, working round and up to them, not taking them out as weaker men would have done. He would draw the dark outlines by putting more water to wet brushes, and driving the colour to the edge to dry there, firm and dark. He would draw the broken edges of clouds with a quiver of the brush, then round the vapour by laying on a little more colour into parts not wet, and lastly dash in warm touches of light when dry on the outside edges. "In his advanced stage, and in finished drawings,

he no doubt damped and soaked and pumped on his paper, so as to be able to work with a wooden point. The superfluous colour he would remove, but he never stifled or muddled one tint with another; nor would he use friction so as to destroy the edge and purity of a colour. His finer vignettes (as for his Milton) are on smooth cardboard, his coarser ones on sheets of thin drawing-paper; and in some of his sketches he would colour on both sides, so that the paper could never have been soaked. There is no doubt, too, that besides his work on wet paper with wooden point, and his wonderful method of taking out high lights with bread, he had many secrets of manipulation, as, for instance, in imitating the dark broken edges of waves. In an Italian drawing that Mr. Allnutt now possesses there is an evident intentional graining given to a large block of stone in the right foreground by the pressure of a thumb in half-wet colour. You can still see the impression of the pores of the painter's skin.

"The painting exhibited by Turner in 1805, 'The Battle of Fort Rock in Val d'Aosta,' combines all the painter's peculiarities. There are lights bluntly wiped out of the local colour of the sky, and sharply and decisively on the foreground trees; others scraped out with a blunt instrument while the colour was wet, as in the moss on the wall, and part of the firtrees on the right-hand bank; lights scratched out, as in one of the waterfalls; others cut sharp and clear with a knife from the wet paper, as in the housings of the mules on the mountain road; and then for texture and air there has been much general surface-washing.

"In the Hornby Castle' (South Kensington), painted in his best time, all his expedients to secure effect are employed. He has washed down broken tints to obtain variety and gradations in the distance by (I quote again Mr. Redgrave) abrasion of the paper, thinning the surface for sharp and sunny glitters of light, and removing lights by wiping out."

In one painting I find what appear to be touches of yellow chalk over a scratched surface; in fact, as Reynolds is said to have worked snuff and cinders into his pictures, so Turner seems to have rejected no accident.

Alluding to the gradual introduction of colour into Turner's work, Mr. Ruskin says:

"The Crossing the Brook,' and such other elaborate and large compositions, are actually painted in nothing but grey, brown, and blue, with a point or two of severe local colour in the figures; but in the minor drawings, tender passages of complicated colour occur not unfrequently in easy places; and even before the year 1800 he begins to introduce it with evident joyfulness and longing in his rude and simple studies, just as a child, if it could be supposed to govern itself by a fully developed intellect, would cautiously, but with infinite pleasure, add now and then a tiny dish of fruit or other dangerous luxury to the simple order of its daily fare. Thus in the foregrounds of his most severe drawings, we not unfrequently find him indulging in the luxury of a peacock; and it is impossible to express the joyfulness with which he seems to de