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THE COUNTRY EDEN.

The school was kept by a Mr. John White, and was opposite the Three Pigeons, at Brentford Butts. It was a school, or rather an "academy," such as old Boswell sneered at when he heard that his ne'er-do-weel son had forgathered with Johnson, an auld dominie, who had kept a schule, and ca'ad it an acawdemy! It contained, when the sickly, pale boy came down to it from London, fifty boys and ten girls-all, I presume, of tender ages.

Turner has left drawing lions from Mr. Tomkinson's salver now. He is removed by his good angel from the large-pillared church of St. Paul, that Hogarth introduced into his pictures; from the railedin burial-ground where his dear friend and fellowworker Girtin was afterwards to sleep; from the heaps of Hesperides fruit; from the flowers that still retain traditions of Eden; from red roofs and driv ing blasts of brown smoke; from crimson fog-suns and misty slants of sunshine-to a very Promised Land for a boy-artist. The green fields of Paradise to him were the fields round vulgar Putney and lonely, peaceful Twickenham. The birds must have been to him as little flying angels newly transformed, and the air seemed of sapphire brightness and transparency. It was, I know, near twenty years before I, myself a London-born boy, could forget the exquisite delight of my first days in the country and on the Thames side, where tree, bird, sky, river, seemed but as so many voices uniting in one calm, yet unceasing chorus of gratitude and joy to God their Creator.

We must imagine the hairdresser's son thrown, dazed, confused, and tearful with memories of father

and mother and home, among the sixty boys and girls in the academy opposite the "Three Pigeons." He probably, as we all have done (genius or no genius), cried bitterly the first night under the sheets, then stifled his sobs, in a day or two grew tamer and happier, and wrote home with good tidings. In a week or two he began to get into gear and work better in the new harness. Then comes the day when, with flaming eyes, bristling hair, cheek white with rage, not fear, and clenched teeth, we fight the school bully (probably a tyrannous West Indian, who bribes crowds of small parasites with jars of tamarinds and guava jelly) who has dared to sneer at our old father the "barber" in Maiden-lane, and ask his son if they baste the legs of mutton in Hand-court with bears' grease. Then come school 'scapes, bitter canings, dreadful difficult passages of "Delectus" and verses of Virgil, or Propria quæ maribus, that no earthly memory can retain.

Gradually, the old instinct works through the shallow crust of Latin grammar and English history. There is much surreptitious drawing of elm-trees and blackbirds in fly-leaves of "Cæsars" and "Telemachuses." Long afterwards old school-fellows of Turner's used to say, that his first attempts at art had been drawings of birds and flowers and trees from the school-room windows-rude attempts at the rose, the elm, and the blackbird no doubt, yet still showing the way the twig was bent. The delights of the country were undoubtedly acting like yeast on the impressionable seething brain of the young genius. Penned in London fog, he might have become a Piranesi in architecture; free and happy in the

country, he became a landscape-painter-most true, yet most poetic of landscape-painters-bringing back for us a lost Eden by the force of his enchantments.

Still using the valuable notes from Mr. Bell's MS. book, I find that many of these early sketches were taken by stealth-" Stolen waters are sweet," says Solomon-his school-fellows, sympathizing with his taste, often did "his sums" for him while he pursued the bent of his compelling genius.

To these early days in the country Turner owed much. The chestnut-avenue at Bushy Park-the terraces of Hampton Palace-the green calm meadows -the reflective cattle-the pouting, scornful swans -the fast-flowing river-the summer elms, so dense and dark and close, yet peopled with chorister birds,— must all, as after-work showed, have reached his young heart, stirred him to poetry, and roused his veneration, his sense of sublimity, and his love for the beautiful. I think that no place breeds so strong a reactionary love for poetry and art as London-the vast, the negative, the miserable, the loathsome, the great, the magnificent.

It was probably indelible recollections of these early days that afterwards led Turner to come and live at Twickenham, near his old school. It led him to delight-and this years after-in drawing swans in all attitudes; and it was long before even the flatroofed stone-pines of Italy could efface the memory of the Bushy elms and the Brentford meadows gilt with flowers and azure with forget-me-nots.

But before I lead Turner (the boy William) from school, let me sketch the lads there, as I know from

THE OLD SCHOOLMASTER.

23

almost contemporary accounts of schools, how they must have looked.

the

eye

They walk out two and two, and on Sundays dazzle with extraordinary and not to be forgotten colours-pea-green, scarlet, sky-blue, snuff-brown, and bright claret. The richer boys wear little, smart, triangular gold-laced hats, above flowing locks of sable or flaxen, that curl down over the shoulders of the little stiff-skirted Tommy and Harry coats of formal cut.

The master is probably a spare, shrivelled man in a large bushy wig, rather brown from want of powder, with ink-stained ruffles and coarse blue worsted stockings, a snuffy camlet coat, and when he walks out, he swings a rather brassy-looking gilt-headed cane. N.B. He is a great authority at the "Three Pigeons" opposite.

It was on the forms of Brentford that the cane of Mr. John White probably "bit into" Turner, to use an engravers' term, the stories of the Gardens of the Hesperides, Polyphemus, the escape of Ulysses, and those other classic fables which his genius afterwards selected to reframe, restore, and illuminate; or if he did not read them in notes to Virgil, he might at least have conned Pope's "Odyssey," which is generally a current book among schoolboys.

Now comes the barber from Maiden-lane,* and takes home little William, with his head crammed with undigested scraps of "Delectus," dictations, classic stories,

* I remember the house well-I have been up and down and all over it. The old barber's shop was on the ground floor, entered by a little dark door on the left side of Hand-court. The window was a long, low one; the stairs were narrow, steep, and winding; the rooms low, dark, and small, but square and cosy, however Turner's bedroom, dirty and confined they may have been.

and English history. He has to leave his butcher uncle and his aunt on his mother's side, and retire again to shelter under the great shadow of St. Paul's.

Father still warms to art, encouraged, I suppose, by artist customers, who talk of Hogarth, Paul Sandby, and Gainsborough while their heads are being shaved. The boy prattles of Brentford and the river, and exhibits his stolen hieroglyphics of birds and trees. He is at once sent, let us suppose, at eleven or twelve (for tradition is vague about the date), to the Soho academy, where now, I presume, serene and happy, he draws flowers, &c., after the tambourframe manner, for Heaven knows what indefinite commercial purpose, under a Mr. Palice, a floral drawingmaster. Of the toilsome and perhaps not unprofitable hours in the ill-omened square, haunted by the headless ghost of the brainless Duke of Monmouth, the scene of so many fashionable masquerades, and dinners too, but a few short years before, I have no record.

We may suppose the boy slowly advancing (for he was one of the slow ripeners), trying colours, drawing houses and churches, assaying and testing everything in a patient, careful way. "Evidently an artist is William," says the father to himself, as he runs about with the hot tongs and frizzles them clean in thin curling-paper.

He is now thirteen, growing up short and thick

where he generally painted, looked into the lane, and was commanded by the opposite windows. The house where I suppose he afterwards went to for more quiet and room, is at the end of Handcourt, and is on a larger scale, with two windows in front; but it must have been rather dark, though less noisy than his father's house.