described-always by name-as one of the severest of Turner's critics, an open enemy indeed' (ii. 207); as 'the most foul-mouthed of Turner's detractors' (ii. 322); as having 'viewed him with the jaundiced eye of envy.' (ii. 324.) Mr. Thornbury's heel, therefore, must have been pretty nearly ground away on the tombstone of this unfortunate writer -an artist of some note, who, whatever his feelings towards Turner may have been, appears to have said nothing of him more malicious than the scurrilous aspersions contained in Mr. Thornbury's own volumes. But Mr. Thornbury is not content with abusing his own predecessors. In order to exalt Turner, he thinks it necessary to bespatter many of the persons with whom the painter came into contact; and this system is carried on even in cases where there is no apparent pretext for it. Thus, after telling us that Mr. Porden, an architect, who had employed him, when a boy, in filling up architectural drawings with skies and foregrounds, offered to take him as an apprentice without a premium, the biographer breaks out 'Oily Mr. Porden! Without a premium, indeed! Why, in seven years young Turner would have painted you drawings worth three times your premium. Go to! you are, I fear, an oily Pecksniff, trying to cheat a man, and all the time professing a deceitful kindness with a lying smile. membrance which he has left in the minds of those who knew him. We need not here collect any more instances of the detraction in which Mr. Thornbury habitually deals, since other examples of it will occur in the course of our article; but as the phrase I fear' is found in both of those which we have quoted, we may remind the reader of Mr. Hallam's gloss on it when used by Dr. Lingard in suggesting a bad construction of Anne Boleyn's conduct,-"I fear," i. e. wish to believe.' We have already hinted that paste and scissors have been largely employed in the production of this book. How largely, we are quite unable to say; for, although the obligation is sometimes acknowledged-as in the pages which are copiously borrowed from Leslie's 'Autobiography' and in some part of the sheetfuls of matter which are transferred from Mr. Ruskin-such acknowledgement is rather the exception than the rule in Mr. Thornbury's practice, and we have no means of measuring the extent of his unavowed appropriations. The words, however, which we have already quoted as to Mr. Wornum, if they are intended to express the amount of the biographer's debt to that gentleman's Writings as well as to his private communica tions, are really astounding; for, instead of two or three dates,' it will be found on examination that Mr. Wornum has been laid uuder contribution for many pages of de 'The race of Porden is not yet by any means scription, history, criticism, and other matter. extinct.'-i. 48. Again: 'There is a story told of Turner's love of concealment, which connects him with Britton, the publisher of so many architectural works-a plausible and, I fear, a very mean man; one of those bland, selfish squeezers of other men's brains, that still occasionally disgrace literature.' -ii. 154. What the story is, Mr. Thornbury does not there inform us; but it may be found at vol. i. p. 389, and is very little to the purpose, even if true, while the character given of Britton is utterly inconsistent with the reThornbury, i. 289. · For instance, the account of the origin and progress of the National Gallery, vol. i. pp. 304-5, is taken bodily from the Catalogue of the British School,' which is sold at the Gallery for sixpence; and the descriptions of the pictures in the chapters entitled 'Turner's Art-Life' are mainly drawn either from the same excellent but inexpensive manual, or from the more sumptuous letterpress of the 'Turner Gallery. Of this we shall give one or two instances, which will be amply sufficient by way of proof. As to the picture of the Blacksmith's Forge,' we find this coincidence between the two writers: Wornum, 'The Turner Gallery,' 147; the other picture, No. 162. The scene is a sunshine interior, and there is scarcely any red visible in it.' tween Turner's two pictures, because the "Sun iron is but just perceptible. The last words of the extract from Mr. | Thornbury has throughout mixed up the two. Wornum relate not to the 'Forge,' but to Here is another instance :the Sunrise; but it will be seen that Mr. Thornbury, i. 296. 'The same year, Turner exhibited at the British Institution his "Apuleia in search of Apuleius," which Turner quoted Ovid for, but which is neither in Ovid, Lucian, nor Apuleius; the painter did not care for accuracy when he could invent pleasingly.' 'This picture was painted for the Earl of Egremont as a companion to the celebrated Claude there [where ?], engraved by Woollett.' 'It is a hilly landscape, with a large sevenarched bridge, spanning a river with wooded banks: a windmill and town on the right; in the foreground are Apuleia and her companions, questioning some peasants, who are resting in the shade of a tree. One of the peasants, in imitation of a Poussin picture, points to the name Apuleius, which is carved on a tree.' Apuleius, who lived in the second century after Christ, was the author of the curious but very obscene poem, "The Golden Ass."' Again, as to the 'Battle of Trafalgar,' now in Greenwich Hospital, Mr. Thornbury's list of the painter's inaccuracies and inconsistencies (i. 292) is copied from the Turner Gal Thornbury. 'The picture is a bad composition in point of art, and is much disliked by sailor critics. Nelson's favourite captain, Sir Thomas Hardy, said of it, "It looks more like a street scene than a battle, and the ships more like houses than menof-war." An old Greenwich pensioner said of it, "I can't make English of it, Sir; I can't make English of it; it wants altering altogether." Another tar, vexed at seeing a visitor pore over it, remarked, "What a Trafalgar! it is a d-d deal more like a brickfield. We ought to have had a Huggins." These passages, which are mere samples of a large part of the book, will be enough to show that Mr. Thornbury's obligations to Mr. National Gallery Catalogue, British School, 3rd edition, 1858, pp. 90–1. "The Catalogue of the British Institution for 1814 refers to Ovid's "Metamorphoses" for this story; it is, however, not one of Ovid's. "Lucius, or the Enchanted Ass," of Lucian, preceded the "Golden Ass" of Apuleius, but both are subsequent to Ovid. The personage Apuleia, and the incident represented, appear to be equally the painter's own invention.' This picture, exhibited at the British Institution, in 1814, was painted as a companion to the celebrated Claude in the possession of the Earl of Egremont, at Petworth, Sussex, of which there is an engraving by Woollett.' 'An extensive hilly landscape: in the middle distance a large bridge of seven arches over a river, with rich woody banks a watermill and town on the spectator's right. In the foreground are Apuleia and her companions, and some peasants reposing in the shade of a tree. One of the peasants is pointing to the name Apuleius carved in the bark of the tree.' เ Apuleius was a distinguished philosopher and advocate of the second century of our era, and was the author of the celebrated romance entitled "The Metamorphosis, or the Golden Ass," in which he represents himself as transformed into an ass. The incident, however, represented in this picture is not in the story of Apuleius.' lery,' pp. 16, 17, where it is given on the authority of James's 'Naval History,' and we have the following remarkable parallel : Wornum. 'This picture as a matter-of-fact battle-piece was early condemned by naval critics; and it is very inferior also to perhaps all Turner's other sea-pieces as a mere pictorial composition. Sir Thomas Hardy said it looked as much like a street-scene as a battle, as the ships were more like houses than men-of-war; and, very recently, an old pensioner, observing a visitor paying rather more attention to the picture than he seemed to think it deserved, approached him and remarked, "What a Trafalgar! it's a d-d deal more like a brickfield! We ought to have had a Huggins." Another remarked, "I can't make English of it, Sir! I can't make English of it! it wants altering altogether." Wornum are not limited to 'two or three dates.' But how helpless he is as to 'the matter of dates,' when left to himself, may appear from his notice of the last-mentioned picture. Mr. Wornum had said that this was painted some time after the "Death of Nelson," but there is no record of its exhibition.' (p. 14.) Mr. Thornbury's version of the matter is, that the 'Trafalgar' was painted 'probably about the same year (1808)' with the Death of Nelson; while his own book contains evidence in a letter from Turner to Sir Thomas Lawrence (ii. 236) that the date of the 'Trafalgar' was 1825! 6 Before leaving the subject of Mr. Thornbury's borrowings, we may notice that, in so far as we remember, he has only in one instance, throughout his two volumes, given a reference to his authority by volume and page. Even as regards books so well known as the Modern Painters' or Leslie's 'Recollections,' the omission of references is very unsatisfactory; but it is altogether perplexing when the author is giving quotations from other writers, as to which the reader cannot be expected to know whether they come from books or pamphlets, from articles in periodicals or from unpublished manuscripts, whether from writings which expressly profess to treat of Turner, or from writings in which the title would not lead us to expect information about him. These two last sentences we can only understand by putting on them the very opposite sense to that which the words convey: sending to' seems to mean receiving back from. But Mr. Thornbury's more level style is frequently relieved by passages of bombastical rant, caricatured from the worst manners of Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Ruskin, with a mixture of Mr. Charles Reade, and of the grandiloquence which is supposed to belong to the dramatists of the Victoria Theatre. In his headings Mr. Thornbury, as well as Mr. Ruskin, appears to have aimed at puzzling instead of assisting the reader. But there is a characteristic difference between the two; for while in the 'Modern Painters' we are left to divine the meaning of 'The Angel of the Sea,' 'The Dark Mirror,' 'The Land of Pallas,' The Wings of the Lion,'' The Nereid's Haunt,'The Hesperid Æglé,' and the like— the Life of Turner' presents us with such titles as (to quote from the head-lines of a single chapter) The Voyage of Discovery,' The Old Admiral,' 'Dying,' Mysterious,' · Mr. Thornbury, although a practised manufacturer of books, seems to think that the only requisite for his art is the power of filling the largest possible space. He has no idea of method or order, of digesting his materials, or of constructing a narrative. A great part of his matter has no special reference to Turner, and might as well be intro-The Empty Rooms,'' Revoking,' 'The Crows duced into the life of any contemporary artist, or, indeed, into that of any contemporary whatever. Things are repeated over and over and over,-sometimes with variations which leave us in uncertainty as to the truth or which show that the compiler has not understood the information supplied to him. Statements are sometimes dropped, as if by accident, into places where they have no connexion with the matter before or after them; there are the strangest incoherences and the most abrupt transitions. Blunders are heaped on blunders; contradictions are perpetually clashing; and Mr. Thornbury will assuredly never be styled a great authority on the matter of dates,' however truly he may deserve the remaining part of the character which he bestows on Mr. Wornum. The ordinary style is that with which the readers of country newspapers are familiar in the jaunty letters of our London correspondent; and the correctness and refinement of Mr. Thornbury's less ambitious composition may be estimated from such passages as these :- on the Carcase,''Issue Joined,' 'Law,' ‘Talk,' A Grateful Government,' 'Going to Begin, Circumlocution,' 'Discussion,' 'Palaver,' Lumber. For mouthy mysticism there is cockney pertness; and it is hard to say which is the more annoying. There is a continual parade of allusions or illustrations, which may commonly be traced to no wider a circle of learning than the 'Vicar of Wakefield' and a smattering of Boswell, a little of Pope, and a slight knowledge of Hogarth's prints, with such further information about the eighteenth century as may be gleaned from Lord Macaulay's Essays,' Mr. Thackeray, and Mr. Forster. Add to this some study of playbills and of exhibition catalogues, and the general literature necessary for the production of such a book will be pretty nearly complete. Mr. Thornbury's acquaintance with the classics may be tested by the facts that, after having enumerated from some guidebook the worthies connected with Maiden Lane, he tells us that the dirty lane has contributed its quota to the mythology of dear old London' (i. 9); that he loftily discourses on 'circumstance— the Nemesis of the Greeks' (i. 12); that he reports Mr. Jones to have written on the frame of one of Turner's idealised Italian views, 'Splendida mendax' (i. 228); that he displays his Greek by speaking of the awful primary verbs eimai and tupto' (i. 308), and by changing the name of Loutherbourg's 'Epidophusikon' into Eidophuskion (i. 158); that (as we have seen) he turns the Golden Ass' from a prose romance into a poem; and that he has always thought the worst thing told of Caligula was his habit of spending leisure hours in pricking flies to death' (ii. 123). The accuracy of his acquaintance with older English literature is shown by quoting Ben Jonson as having said that Shakespeare had little Latin and less Greek' (i. 309), and by twice telling us that the Pilgrim's Progress' contains a scene described as Faith of Perrin' (ii. 353, 363);* the accuracy of his geographical knowledge, by his placing Orvieto on the Lake of Bolsena (i. 307); the accuracy of his acquaintance with Scripture, by telling us that when Turner's intention of founding a charity became known after his death, the great edifice of lies fell to dust, like the house built on the sand' (ii. 126). 6 For a specimen of Mr. Thornbury's picturesque manner we need not go further than the second and third paragraphs of the 'Life': 'His father William Turner, a barber, well known in the district of the Garden, lived at the west end of Maiden-lane..... Only a side door of the murky house is still extant, and that is now absorbed into the sticky warerooms of Mr. Parkin, an adjoining grocer, who has pushed his conquests even to Hand-court. Geographically considered, the consecrated house was No. 26, and stood on the left-hand corner of Hand-court, near the south-west corner of Covent Garden, This court is a sort of gloomy horizontal shaft, or paved tunnel, with a low archway and prison-like iron gate of its own. You must stand for some minutes in the quenched light of this archway before you can see the coffin-lid door to the left that led to the small barber's small shop in the days of Dr. Johnson. The front window, once grotesquely gay with dummies, such as Hogarth loved to stop and draw, is still extant.'-i. 1, 2. Johnson and Hogarth are two of the personages whom writers of this school (for there is a school of them) must drag in continually, without any sort of pretext; although why they should lavish their condescending fondness on Johnson, who of all men that ever lived would perhaps have been the least tolerant of such literature as theirs, we are quite unable to imagine. But we meet with the Doctor again and again; for example, when Turner was working in Reynolds's studio: 'Perhaps stern Dr. Johnson is on the easelvous Dr. Beattie, Goldsmith, or that tremendous perhaps leering Laurence Sterne-perhaps nerMarquis of Granby, the Mars Ultor [!] of innsigns-perhaps great Dr. Johnson may, in the course of the day, come in and peer at him as he works,' &c.-i. 64. taken place in 1789, we do not think it likely Now, as this scene is supposed to have that Sir Joshua would have had on his easel Lord Granby, who died in 1770, of Goldthe portraits of Sterne, who died in 1768, of smith, who died in 1774, or of Johnson, who died in 1784; and if Johnson had made his five years after his death, we may be sure personal appearance in the painting-room that so remarkable a fact would not have been unrecorded by Boswell, whose taste for the supernatural was notoriously strong. But this is only an ordinary specimen of the strange anachronisms into which Mr. Thornvicious fondness of his school for representbury continually falls when indulging the ing imaginary scenes. Nay, even when he has some better authority than his own imagination, Mr. Thornbury is unable to describe correctly. Thus, in relating that Turner visited Scotland in 1818, with a view to illustrating Scott's 'Provincial Antiquities,' he gives us a picture of the great novelist's study, which proves that he is too careless not only to copy statements with accuracy, but even to take the trouble of understanding a plain description: It is this very year,' says Mr. Thornbury, mond in Scott's study in Castle-street.'—i. 182. 'that Lockhart describes meeting Home Drum On turning to the Life of Scott,' we find the real state of the case to have been that Lockhart met Scott for the first time at a dinner given by Mr. Home Drummond; and that, in consequence of a communication from Messrs. Ballantyne, the printers, he called in Castle Street a few days later, when he found Scott alone (v. 317-321, ed. 2). But let us observe what, according to Mr. Thornbury, was to be seen there :- *This is in a list of engravings after Turner, compiled by the late Mr. Stokes. Faith of Perrin, is evidently a printer's mistake, which Mr. Thorn'The ground was strewn with folios and octabury was unable to discover. The blunder arises vos (Comines for "Quentin Durward," Pepys out of the circumstance that the plate was used for for "Peveril"). Scott sat at a desk with drawa Welsh edition of Bunyan, as well as for the Eng-ers, the top of which was covered with Seslish. Taith Pererin being the Welsh for The sions-papers, letters, proofs, red-tape, and green Pilgrim's Progress. tin boxes.' others cry "Impossible!" and go on talking about other things. 'But can you stop the lion in mid-leap? Can you drive off a shark by shouting when his doll man of wax and saw-dust. This is not one teeth have closed on your flesh? This is not a of those committee-creatures whom lords and ministers pull with a red-tape string, so that it says "Yes" and "No," and rolls its eyes at the required moment. This is a Nemean man [!] a real, stern, honest man, staunch as an English bull-dog, and almost as pertinacious and in domitable. "We must find a good place for this young man's picture." "Impossible, impossible!" says the gold spectacles again, and more oracularly this time than before. Mr. Thornbury evidently holds, with Osborne, in Vanity Fair,' that a man of letters must be a 'littery man;' and this formidable picture is, doubtless, agreeable to his ideal of the habits which befit such a person. But Lockhart expressly tells us that Scott's habits were very different; and on looking at the original description we find that, instead of the confusion represented by Mr. Thornbury, everything is order. The green boxes were not on the desk, but piled over each other, on one side of the window.' The papers on 'All this time he is examining the picturethe desk (or rather on the table, with which right, left, surface, clear-obscure, touch, colour, it was connected) were all neatly done up character-carefully; he sees it is good; he cries with' that same 'red tape' which Mr. Thorn-out again, and hushes the buzz of voices. bury represents as an element straggling in the chaos; and instead of a floor strewn with folios and octavos,' we read in Lockhart that a dozen volumes or so, needful for immediate purposes of reference, were placed close by him on a moveable frame.'* Mr. Thornbury allows his fancy to add, that among the books were 'Comines,' for 'Quentin Durward,' and 'Pepys,' for 'Peveril.' Unluckily, it so happens not only that the novels in question cannot have been in hand in 1818, as 'Peveril' was written in 1822, and Quentin Durward' in the following year; but that Pepys was not available for the composition of 'Peveril,' inasmuch as the 'Diary' did not appear until 1825. Of other blunders in connexion with Scott, and with Turner's visits to Scotland, we do not think it necessary to speak. But if this be the biographer's manner of dealing with an original which we know, what confidence can we place in him where we are unable to trace him to his authorities, or where his statements are made on verbal information? But Here is another pictorial scene, which we quote at length, with a view of enabling the reader to form some idea of Mr. Thornbury's taste, as well as of his accuracy :— เ When Bird, the son of a Wolverhampton clothier, about 1811, first sent a picture to the Royal Academy-it might have been "Good News," or "Choristers Rehearsing," or some other of those early anticipations of Wilkie and Webster-Turner was one of the "Hanging Committee," as it was opprobriously called. Every one said the picture of the new man had great merit, but there was no place fit for it left unoccupied. Here was a desirable guest, but the inn was full. The R.A.s looked stolidly content, as people inside an omnibus on a wet day do when the conductor looks in at the win dow, and begs to know "if any jintleman would like to go outside and make room for a lady." The R.A.8 joke and talk. The days of chivalry are past. Turner growls, and is disturbed; he up and says, "that come what may, the young man's picture must have a place." All the *Life of Scott, v. 321-3, ed. 1839. 'Turner said no more, but quietly removed one of his own pictures and hung up Bird's.'— ii. 112-2. We do not undertake to say how much of this is truth; but by looking at the Academy catalogues, of which a set is (according to Mr. Thornbury's favourite phrase) 'buried in the British Museum,' but may be disinterred by any inquirer, it might have been easily ascertained that Bird's first picture exhibited in London was 'Good News,' in the year 1809. Although, however, the date is thus thrown back two years beyond the time mentioned by Mr. Thornbury, the picture was not an early anticipation of Wilkie;" for Wilkie, although younger than Bird, had been an exhibitor from 1806, became an Associate of the Academy in the year of Bird's first picture, and in the year 1811, to which Mr. Thornbury refers the scene, was elected an Academician. Nor was the provincial painter really to be described by Turner as 'a young man,' although it is possible that Turner may have supposed him such; for his age in 1809 was thirty-seven, while Turner himself was then only thirty-four. Perhaps, however, the most absurd of all Mr. Thornbury's imaginary pictures is the following, for a reason which will presently appear. We are told of a letter ... penned when Turner was about forty; and it described him as deeply in love with a lady. It was the letter of an affectionate, but It implored his friend shy and eccentric man. down again; but expressed his fear that he to help him at his need; talked of soon coming should never find courage to pop the question unless the lady helped him out.ii. 40. And then comes the following burst 'At last, then, we have sure proof that the passion of the boy had begun to fade out, as dint of the lightning-bolt will even out of gra |