and breadth, with a certain stolidity and dulness superadded. Malton's school in Long Acre taught Turner how to put backgrounds to architects' drawings-one of the sources of income to the struggling artist of Turner's age. Profits were small then, employment scanty. The pictures of English artists, unless portrait - painters, were little cared for. "I knew him," says an old architect still living, แ "when a boy, and have often paid him a guinea for putting backgrounds to my architectural drawings, calling upon him for this purpose at his father's shop in Maiden-lane, Covent-garden; he never would suffer me to see him draw, but concealed, as I understood, all that he did in his bed-room."

Turner was a short, sturdy, sailor-like youth, of a vigorous constitution, and brought up to bear hard beds and simple fare. There could not be better qualifications for the pedestrian's sketching tours that he had now commenced. He walked twenty to twentyfive miles a day, with his baggage tied up in a handkerchief, and swinging on the end of his stick. He sketched quickly all the good pieces of composition he met. He made quick pencil-notes in his pocketbook, and photographed into his mind legions of transitory effects by aid of a stupendous, retentive, and minute memory.

One of his earliest tours was that made to Oxford to execute drawing commissions for his kind patron, Mr. Henderson. The tour was made on foot, in company with a poor artist named Cook, who afterwards turned stone-mason. Cook's feet got sore, and I believe he was soon left behind by the indefatigable

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LONDON AND VENICE.

Turner; as for sleeping, he rested in any small village public-house, and never prematurely affected the fine gentleman.

Mr. Ruskin devotes a very noble chapter to a contrast between the Venice of Giorgione's boyhood and the London of Turner's. The golden city paved with emerald (dreadful bilge-water smell always in Venice), where the deep-hearted, majestic men of Venice moved in sway of power and war (terrible Tartars, with pozzi and thumbscrews), he contrasts with dirty, foggy, low-spirited, peddling, cramped-up, dear old London.

But I really think (in all humility) that Turner had not so much, after all, to lament. If he had not "pillars of alabaster" women, he had a pure and true religion; if he had not men with sea rust on their armour, he had at least freedom, and none of those horrid burning prisons under the leads. If he had not the ships of Lepanto, he had Nelson's men-of-war. If he had not Venetian discoverers, he had Cook and Anson. I really think he was not so badly off with poor little Old England and her great glory as his birthright, after all.

Mr. Ruskin, speaking of Maiden-lane, says Turner all his life loved to draw and paint anything resembling Maiden-lane or the Thames shore. For these reasons he liked "dead brick walls," blank square windows, old clothes, market-women, anything fishy and muddy (like Billingsgate or Hungerford Market), black barges, patched sails, and every possible condition of fog, dinginess, smoke and soot, dirty sides of boats, weeds, dunghills, straw-yards,

TEACHING DRAWING.

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and "all the soilings and stains of every common labour." He liked litter, too, "like Covent-garden wreck after market." "The last words," says Mr. Ruskin, "he (Turner) ever spoke to me were in gentle exultation about his 'St. Gothard.' 'That litter of stones which I endeavoured to represent.'

Turner now began to teach water-colour drawing at schools, obtaining first five shillings a lesson, then ten shillings, and subsequently a guinea; and his talent becoming known, he was soon employed at more advanced prices to make drawings for Mr. Harrison, a publisher, of Paternoster-row. He was also engaged to make views for the Oxford Almanac, and acquired a reputation which caused his drawings to be sought after, and procured him an introduction to several noblemen and gentlemen. We are now arrived at the period of Turner's life when he had become fairly established in his profession.

CHAPTER IV.

LOVE AND AMBITION.

It is perhaps to about this period of the painter's life that we must assign an event that affected his mind for ever. When he was at Margate, as we have before said, Turner had formed an acquaintance with the family of one of his schoolfellows. To his school comrade's sister he soon became attached: she has long been dead now, but beautiful or not, Turner was one of those who could have seen "Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt." He loved her, there can be no doubt, with an unchanging love the misery of his whole scathed life, and the constant dwelling on those sad words, "THE FALLACIES OF HOPE," are fully sufficient to prove that: and love must have transformed the dull houses of Margate, where he afterwards loved so much to visit, to golden palaces. The wind, as it rippled the sail of the boat he sat sketching in, must have lisped her name; the waves frothing against the cliffs must have roared incessantly to the lover's ears that one word.

Turner was not then the red-faced, blue-eyed, slovenly dressed old painter he afterwards became; he was the bright-eyed young genius, always old looking, as tradition says, but still winning, with some of the

divinity of youth radiant on his features. He did not grunt out his dry monosyllables then; the love of money had not yet corroded into him; he was not silent, suspicious, and mistrustful, though already reserved about his art and anxious about his profits.

He caught the old ailment we all have suffered from sighed, wrote verses, blushed, doubted certainties, and was certain about love-tokens that to any sane person were more than doubtful. He wished himself dead; he trembled; his heart was now a lump of lead, and now it seemed to sing for joy. He grew hot, he grew cold, he turned pale, he turned red, he talked nonsense at twilight; he walked, swam, rode and drove, thinking but of her; seeing her name written on the sands, in the clouds, hearing the trees whisper it all through the Kentish land, and far above the hop-fields hearing the birds warble it.

One eventful hour in the summer dusk he dares to ask the question: he hears the whispered, bashful yes," his soul soars up again to the seventh heaven, and there joy crowns it. Now he cares not if pictures fail or not; if work comes not, or comes; if rivals triumph, or if patrons grind. He is eternally happy.

"O golden time of youthful love.”—(SCHILLER.)

But now a blunder creeps into the tradition: it goes on to say that "the courtship proceeded until, at the age of nineteen, or thereabout, Turner went abroad in order to study his art, and that, before leaving, vows of fidelity were exchanged between the two lovers."