from unfavourable criticisms on his paintings ('Mod. Painters,' v. 345). To the same effect Mr. Thornbury writes that

About 1844 the wits (wits are ever cruel) began to be very severe on the poor old painter, of whose greatness they were ignorant, and whose nobler works had pleased a previous generation. Turner felt terribly their cruelty and ingratitude. . . . . It was as if an ape of St. Helena had sat down to write a Life of Napoleon, judging him only from his daily observations of him in that island.'-ii. 196, 198.

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In proof of this he quotes from Punch'-and the references here are the only references that we have observed in the whole work the following attack on the dying lion':

'Trundler, R.A., treats us with some magnificent pieces.

34. A Typhoon bursting in a Simoom over the Whirlpool of Maelstrom, Norway; with a ship on fire, an eclipse, and the effect of a lunar rainbow.

"O Art! how vast thy mighty wonders are

To those who roam upon the extraordinary deep;
Maelstrom, thy hand is here!"

From an unpublished poem.

4. (Great Room.) Hippopotamuses at play in the river Scamander. 1311. The Duke of Wellington and the Shrimp. (Seringapatam, early morning.)

"And can it be, thou hideous imp,

That life is, ah! how brief, and glory but a shrimp!"
From an unpublished poem.

'We must protest against the Duke's likeness here: for though his Grace is short, his face is not of an emerald-green colour; and it is his coat, not his boots, which are vermilion; nor is it fair to make the shrimp (a blue one) taller than the conqueror of Assayc. With this trifling difference of opinion, we are bound to express our highest admiration of the work. It is the greatest that the English school of quiet landscape has produced. The comet just rising above the cataract in the foreground, and the conflagration of Tippoo's widow in the banyan-forest by the sea-shore, are in the great artist's happiest manner.'-ii. 194, 195.

No doubt much of art-criticism was then and is now written by persons alike unacquainted with art and with nature; even Mr. Thornbury himself appears to have been allowed to write on art in some periodicals, and Turner must have had to bear his share of ignorant and flippant remarks. But as to the specimen just quoted, we must say that it would be well if Mr. Punch had never been guilty of anything more unjust or more ill-natured. The titles of the supposed pictures fall short in oddity of those by which Turner about that time delighted to astonish the visitors of the Exhibition. The verses are not very decidedly worse than those

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those which he used to quote from his 'unpublished' MS. The descriptive criticism hardly exaggerates the strange effects which he then crowded into his pictures; and the comical hit about 'quiet landscape' is aimed not at Turner, but at Mr. Ruskin. Nor was this, or more serious unfavourable criticism of the same date, intended to wound the great artist's feelings or written in ignorance of his better works. It was not, we believe, written to insult him in the decay of his powers, but because the writers supposed him to be wilfully abusing those powers; not because they knew nothing of the Crossing the Brook,' the 'Polyphemus,' the Childe Harold,' or the 'Téméraire,' but because they believed that, with the ability still to equal these masterpieces, he preferred to produce such monsters as The Exile and the Rock Limpet,' and 'The Morning after the Deluge—Moses writing the Book of Genesis.'

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In addition to the buyers and the critics of pictures, there were two other classes of persons from whom it is said that Turner suffered grievous injustice, the engravers and the publishers of his plates; and in both cases the evidence appears to us to show that the wrong was on his side. As to the publishers and printsellers, it is enough to quote Mr. Thornbury's statements, that, 'regarding them as Pharaohs,' he exacted from them all that he could get (i. 398); that, when publishing the 'Liber Studiorum' on his own account, he refused to allow them the usual commission (i. 274). If, therefore, the publishers or the dealers met him in something like his own spirit, we cannot wonder or greatly blame them. To the engravers no painter was ever so much indebted: the best skill of the first artists was employed on his plates; they made him popular, by enabling the public to see in their clear black and white that which the ordinary eye could not discern through the peculiarities of his handling, and the perplexing splendour of his colours; and the greatness of his obligations to them is proved by Mr. Thornbury's frequent statements (however much these may require qualification) that his money was mainly gained, not by his pictures, but by the engravings after them. But the engravers found him troublesome beyond all other painters, by the alterations which he continually made during the progress of their plates; alterations which would have been welcome, if intended to bring out better the effect of the originals, but which were in great part deviations from these, and therefore gave just ground for complaint, on account of the additional and unremunerated labour which they entailed. Yet, we are told, it seems to be a general opinion among the engravers that Turner disliked them as a body' (i. 406). We have not space for the discussion of

his quarrels with engravers, and can here only notice the illnatured way in which Mr. Thornbury loads one of these gentlemen, Mr. W. B. Cooke, with imputations wholly unwarranted by Mr. Thornbury's own evidence from which alone we know anything of the matter.

The charge of fondness for money, which has been generally brought against Turner, is fiercely denounced by the biographer, while his own pages contain not only abundant proofs of it, but strong assertions of it by Mr. Thornbury himself. Nor is the impression produced by the ordinary habits of the painter's life to be effaced by such counter-statements as that, although Turner never gave an invitation to dinner, he entertained Mr. Redding and others at a picnic in Devonshire, and sometimes paid the bill of a whole party at Greenwich or Blackwall (ii. 136, 208, 216); that he once gave a five-pound note to a petitioner whom he had treated roughly; that he declined to receive payment of a bill for 5001.; or even by the story, which looks very apocryphal, that he advanced many, many thousands—as much as 20,0007.'to a friend who was in difficulties, and long after repeated this act of generosity to his friend's son-both father and son happily living to repay him (ii. 129), although the advances had been made anonymously, and the elder gentleman 'never knew who was his benefactor.' For such fitful and capricious acts of generosity are recorded of many men whom the world has agreed to stigmatise as misers-of the sculptor Nollekens, for example. Nor can we even agree with the biographer's estimate of Turner's intention to found a hospital for decayed artists-his bequest of 140,000l. to the nation that neglected him' (ii. 34).* We need hardly say that his possession of such wealth is a proof that the nation did not neglect him; and it really seems necessary to remind Mr. Thornbury that Turner had not the option of carrying the money out of the world with him. Nor can we think it admirable that, for the sake (as is asserted) of this great purpose, he was content to 'live like the half-starved steward of a miser's property,' to 'let his house grow into a den,' and to bear the imputation of avarice (ii. 127-169). Surely it would have been better if his habits of life had been made to correspond with the station to which he had raised himself. And since there is such a thing as avarice—since the self-denial of a miser is a part of his character, whether the object of his hoarding be to found a charity or to enrich a family-it may be fairly asked whether charity was Turner's primary object, or whether

*We have already seen that Mr. Thornbury speaks as if this intention had not been known until after Turner's death (ii. 126). But it is else where truly said that 'it was known full thirty years before,' (ii. 320.)

he

he did not (as others had done before him) delude himself, by the thought of posthumous benevolence, into the indulgence of a passion for grasping all that he could get, and of holding it all so long as life should be left to him. He seems, indeed, to have been the slave of a mania for accumulation and retention, without any intelligible object-accumulation and retention, not of money alone, but of other things. Fond as he was of money, he was unwilling to part with his pictures, even at the great prices which they commanded. On the sale of a picture he would say, 'I have lost one of my children this week;' and when his works appeared in auction-rooms he often bought them back. Yet the pictures in his dingy gallery were suffered to go to wreck for want of care; and the thirty thousand proof-impressions which he had wrung from the engravers by so many special agreements, were left to perish by mildew and dirt in portfolios which were never opened.

That Turner's intentions as to the foundation of a charity have been frustrated, every one knows. His will was disputed by the next of kin, on the plea that the testator was of unsound mind. That plea was rightly overruled; but the document was so ill drawn and so inconsistent that nothing could be made of it, and at length a compromise was agreed on, by which the works of art were secured to the nation, the Royal Academy receiving 20,0007.;† and the bulk of the residue was made over to the next of kin. A writer, who is quoted by Mr. Thornbury, remarks strongly, and with justice, on the large alloy of baser metal than usual' which is to be found in the will; on the condition that two of Turner's pictures should be hung between two celebrated works of Claude, -a juxtaposition which, in so far as the Carthage' is concerned, is not generally believed to show the English painter as victorious; ‡ on the glorification of himself by a statue to be erected in St. Paul's; § on his directions that there should be a Turner'

*Mr. Thornbury, finding Sir C. L. Eastlake Knight, P.R.A., and John Prescott Knight, R.A.,' named together in a decree (ii. 295), supposes the word Knight to be a title in both cases, and talks of Eastlake and Prescott' (!), ii. 299. A poor 20,000l.,' says Mr. Thornbury, goes to the Royal Academy-a body already groaning with useless wealth' (ii. 326). But that this money (in receiving which, by way of compromise, we believe the Academy showed great moderation) is not useless will appear from p. 47 of the same volume, where Mr. Roberts tells us that the interest, 600l., is distributed amongst certain old painters not members of the Academy, but whose necessities are such as to compel them to ask charity, in annual grants of 501. each; so that, after all, Turner's wish has in some measure been realised.'

See in vol. ii. 204, the extract from Leslie; also Quart. Review, xcviii. 404-410. § Mr. Thornbury would have had the statue to represent him as lashed to the mast of a vessel, in order that he might observe a snow-storm (i. 335). Bad as much of our monumental sculpture is, we may rejoice that there is nothing so outrageous as this. Gallery,

Gallery, a Turner' medal; and that the charity for artists should be styled Turner's Gift,' as if the painter wished to 'raise his patronymic into a historical institution' (ii. 301-3). But in addition to this we may observe that the charity, if it had been founded, would have been somewhat narrow in its range. It was to be for 'male artists' only, as if Turner considered that women were disqualified for the practice of art. It was to be for persons of lawful issue' only; surely a very needless and harsh limitation when applied to artists themselves, however necessary such a rule may be in the case of persons claiming to be the children of artists or authors. And, farther, it was to be for men born in England, and of English parents only (ii. 411). Thus it would have excluded, not only foreigners settled in England, and among them the unsuccessful countrymen of Roubiliac and Serres and Loutherbourg, of Cipriani and Schiavonetti,-of Lely, Kneller, Cibber, Fuseli, Zoffany, and the elder Cozens-but natives of any part of the British Islands, except England; the countrymen of Wilson and Hugh Williams, of Wilkie, Nasmyth, and the Orcadian Strange, of James Barry, and Danby. It would have excluded natives of the British colonies, like Copley, West, and the Nova-Scotian, Newton; men born in England, whose parentage was not English on both sides, such as Nollekens, John Cozens, and Leslie; and children of English parents on both sides, if born out of England. These limitations would have been found in practice to operate very hardly; and, in so far as we can see, they were laid down without any reasonable ground.

Mr. Ruskin's statement that Turner, with the kindest heart and the noblest intellect of his time, never met with a single word or ray of sympathy until he felt himself sinking into the grave' (ii. 163), has been shown by Leslie to be ridiculously untrue. We can, indeed, believe Mr. Ruskin when he writes, 'My own admiration of him was wild in enthusiasm, but it gave him no ray of pleasure; he loved me, but cared nothing for what I said' ('Mod. Painters,' v. 352);* but it must not be inferred from his treatment of Mr. Ruskin that he was equally indifferent to the society of older acquaintances and less violent

* Turner is said to have declared to one person that he had never read a line of Ruskin,' and to another, 'The man puts ideas into my head I had never thought of. These two stories,' says Mr. Thornbury, contradict each other; it is impossible that both can be true, and unlikely that either is so' (ii. 215). But (1) the stories may both be true, although one of the sayings may have been a 'mystification' such as Turner often indulged in; (2), without having read a line of Ruskin,' he may have known so much of his style of interpretation as would warrant the second saying; or, what is most likely, (3), the sayings may be reconciled by supposing some interval of time between them.

admirers.