Amidst a sea of blood

-but you can join your comrades."

Sometimes, he painted satire, as in the Garreteer's Petition -a poet at work in his attic, consuming the midnight oil: on his wall are pasted a plan of Parnassus, and a table of Fasts. In the Catalogue is this epigraph:

"Aid me, ye powers! O bid my thoughts to roll

In quick succession, animate my soul;

Descend, my Muse, and every thought refine
And finish well my long, my long-sought line."

In the two next, he is not content with Ring's translation of Virgil, but prefers his own prefix:

Mercury sent to admonish Eneas :

"Beneath the morning mist

Mercury waited to tell him of his neglected fleet."

Fallacies of Hope.

"The Lord of heaven and earth, almighty Jove

Sends me with awful warnings from above.
What are your motives for this long delay?

Why thus in Libya pass your life away?-Ring's Eneid.

The Departure of the Trojan Fleet :—

"He then commanded all the Trojan host

To launch the fleet now scattered on the coast.
The pitchy keel now glides along the flood.

*

*

*

At once the seas with sails are cover'd o'er,

And not a Trojan left upon the shore."-Ring's Eneid.
"The orient moon shone on the departing fleet,
Nemesis invoked, the priest held the poisoned cup."

Fallacies of Hope.

The Visit to the Tomb, exhibited in the same year with the above (1850), has this single line :

"The sun went down in wrath at such deceit."

Turner thought much of his Fallacies of Hope, perhaps as much as his admirers thought of his pictures; but the Painter's conceit exposed him to a cutting joke. He refused to sell his picture of Carthage, adding, "I shall be buried in my Carthage." "But they will dig you up, and get your picture for nothing," was the insidious reply; "if you really want to be buried and rest in one of your own works, be buried in your own MS. Fallacies of Hope, and no one will dig you up." Poetry, or rather rhyming, is liable to as many hard rubs as Painting.

"TALKING DOWN."

Hogarth was talked down, and Penny, a now forgotten painter, talked up by no less a critic than Barry. Wilson and Gainsborough were talked down; while Smith of Chichester, and Barrett were talked up. Stothard, Flaxman, and Constable suffered, when living, the same kind of depreciation, while lesser artists were praised and patronised; and Turner, when in the meridian of his glory, was ridiculed without mercy by the fashionable leaders of taste. (Leslie's Handbook, p. 256.)

The fashionable Sir George Beaumont, a painter as well as a patron of art, strongly avowed his heresy of Turner, whom he ridiculed, and endeavoured to talk down; and Fuseli was coarsely abused, and his exaggerated designs ridiculously attributed to his disturbed dreams: he is said to have supped on raw pork-chops, that he might dream his picture of the Nightmare!-but, unfortunately for the story, Fuseli always went to bed supperless. He was known among his brother artists by the name of "Painter in ordinary to the Devil :" he smiled when some one mischievously told him of this, and replied, "Ay, he has sat to me many times."

Sir George Beaumont held that in every landscape there should be at least one brown tree; and that every picture should have a first, second, and third light. "I see," he said, looking at a picture by Constable, "your first and your second lights, but I can't make out which is your third." Constable told this to Turner, who said, "You should have asked him how many lights Rubens introduced."

TURNER AND WILKIE.

After his visit to the Continent, Turner again chose his subjects from English scenery and character, all of which he invested with the poetry of his art. In the same year, (1807), he somewhat oddly painted and exhibited The Sun rising through Vapour, Fishermen cleaning and selling Fish; and a * Country Blacksmith disputing upon the price of Iron, and the price charged to the Butcher for Shoeing his Pony; two pictures, which, (says Cunningham,) killed every picture within the range of their effects. Oddly enough, a modest picture thus injured by being hung between the two fires was The Blind Fiddler, then the second exhibited picture of a lad raw from Scotland, contriving to exist, without getting into debt,

on eighteen shillings a week. On the varnishing day, Turner, it is said, reddened his sun, and blew the bellows of his art upon the blacksmith's forge, "to put the Scotchman's nose out of joint who had gained so much reputation by his Village Politicians."

This story is told, without naming Turner, in Allan Cunningham's Life of Wilkie, and was condemned as an untruth by the reviewer of the Life in the Quarterly Review. But there

is no doubt of the truth of the story; and that Wilkie remembered the circumstance with some acerbity-though he never resented it openly-Mr. Peter Cunningham undertakes to say. When the Forge was sold at Lord de Tabley's sale, Wilkie was in Italy; and Collins, the painter, in describing the sale to him, in a MS. letter before the writer, adds: “and there was your old enemy—the Forge."

TURNER AND CHANTREY.

Many a lively gossip passed between these two friends. Turner had expressed an eccentric intention to be buried in his picture of Carthage; and said to Chantrey, "I have appointed you one of my executors; will you promise to see me rolled up in it?" "Yes," said Chantrey, "and I promise you also that as soon as you are buried, I will see you taken up, and unrolled." Mr. Leslie tells us, this story was so generally believed, that when Turner died, and Dean Milman heard he was going to be buried in St. Paul's, he said, "I will not read the service over him if he be wrapped up in that picture."

"THE SCOTTISH TURNER."

Turner was very chary of his opinions on art; but on the occasion we are about to relate, he said more than was expected. He was taken to see the pictures of Thomson, of Duddingstone, called by his countrymen, in the fondness of their admiration," the Scottish Turner." The friend who took him was anxious to hear what the original Turner thought of his Scottish representative. Thomson, too, was equally eager. Turner examined with attention, mumbled some sounds of apparent approbation, and began and ended by asking—" Where do you get your frames, Mr. Thomson.”

ARTISTIC PREDICTION.

In the year 1820, Constable, the painter, wrote thus: "The art will go out there will be no genuine painting in England

in thirty years." And it is remarkable, that within a few months of the date thus specified, Turner should have died, almost literally fulfilling, as some of his admirers may think, Constable's prophecy. Turner died December 19, 1851.

TURNER'S EARLY VIEWS OF LAMBETH PALACE.

This water-colour drawing, the second exhibited by Turner at the Royal Academy, (see page 311) was, in 1853, in the possession of a lady residing in Bristol, to whose father the drawing was given by the artist after the Exhibition season, and it had never been in other hands. It seems that Turner, when young, was a frequent visitor at the above gentleman's house; and on one occasion he lent Turner a horse, to go on a sketching tour through South Wales.

The same lady had also a small portrait of Turner, done by himself, when visiting her family about the year 1791 or 1792. She had likewise three or four other early drawings by Turner, among which was a view of Stoke Bishop, near Bristol, the seat of Sir Henry Lippincott, Bart., which the artist made as a companion to the Lambeth Palace view. Mr. Walter, the Marine Painter, of Bristol, observes: "As early indications of so great an artist, these drawings are very curious and interesting; but no person that knows anything of the state of watercolour painting at that period, and previous to the era when Turner, Girtin, and others, began to shine out in the new and glorious style, that has since brought water-colour works to their present style of splendour, excellence and value,-will look for anything approaching the perfection of our days."

CHANGES OF RESIDENCE.

As Turner rose in fame, he thought it advisable to remove from over his father's shop," and shifted to apartments of his own in Hand-court. Immediately after his election as an Associate of the Academy, he removed to the house No. 75, Norton-street, Portland-road, where he stayed three years. Thence he removed to No. 64, Harley-street, then a more fashionable and expensive locality than now.

Nor was this all the change. In former times, he had been content to exhibit as "W. Turner;" but with his new affix of letters (A. R. A.) after his name, he had recourse to other initials before his name. From and after his elevation into the Academy, he is "J. M. W. Turner," in Court Guides, and Exhibition Catalogues.

In 1808, when Turner was living in Harley-street, he had country quarters in the Upper Mall at Hammersmith. Four years later, he removed from Harley-street to No. 47, Queen Ann-street West; and 1814, he left the Mall at Hammersmith for what he at first called "Solus Lodge, Twickenham," but soon dropped for Sandycombe Lodge, a kind of cit's countrybox, with pleasant peeps over the Thames. When at Hammersmith, he had Loutherbourg for his neighbour. He is said to have left Twickenham about 1828.

SECRET OF HIS ADDRESS.

Turner had some odd motives for concealing his new abode, whenever he changed it; and his ingenuity in baffling the curiosity of his friends was marvellous-almost equal to that of Dr. Paul Heffernan. Offers were made to walk home with him from the Athenæum Club, for a chit-chat about Academy matters. No: he had got an engagement, and must keep it. Some of the younger sort attempted to follow him, but he managed to steal away from them, to tire them out, or pop into cheap omnibuses, or round dark corners. If he sus

pected that he was followed, he would set off for a tavern haunt; but as soon as this got to be known, he left it, and the landlord lost his customer. Once his hiding-place was nearly discovered. Turner had dined with some friends at Greenwich, had drunk freely, and, on reaching town, was thought to be not sufficiently collected to call a cab. The party, as had been plotted, dropped off, and there was left with Turner only one friend, who placed him in a cab: thinking to catch the bemused painter unawares, he shut the cabdoor, and said, "Where shall he drive to?" Turner was not, however, to be caught, and collectedly replied, " Along Piccadilly, and I will tell him where."-Turner and his Works.

TURNER AND THE CRITIC.

One of the critics termed his Snow-storm-Steam-boat off a Harbour's mouth, making Signals, a mass of soapsuds and whitewash;" to which Turner adroitly replied, "I wish they had been in it."

QUID PRO QUO.

Once, at a dinner, where several artists, amateurs, and literary men were convened, a poet, by way of being facetious,