TURNER'S BOYHOOD.

Mr. Ruskin, in his fifth and concluding volume of Modern Painters, has exquisitely drawn a parallel of the boyhood of Giorgione and Turner, eloquently contrasting their birthplaces and early fortunes. Of Turner's boyhood he says:

Near the south-west corner of Covent Garden, a square brick pit or well is formed by a close-set block of houses, to the back windows of which it admits a few rays of light. Access to the bottom of it is obtained out of Maiden-lane, through a low archway and an iron gate; and if you stand long enough under the archway to accustom your eyes to the darkness, you may see on the left hand a narrow door, which formerly gave quiet access to a respectable barber's shop, of which the front window, looking into Maiden-lane, is stil extant, filled, in this year (1860), with a row of bottles, connected, in some defunct manner, with a brewer's business. A more fashionable neighbourhood, it is said, eighty years ago than now-never, certainly, a cheerful one-wherein a boy being born on St. George's Day, 1775, began soon after to take interest in the world of Covent Garden, and put to service such spectacles of life as it afforded.

No knights to be seen there, nor, I imagine, many beautiful ladies; their costume at least disadvantageous, depending much on incumbency of hat and feather, and short waists; the majesty of men founded similarly on shoe-buckles and wigs ;-impressive enough when Reynolds will do his best for it, but not suggestive of much ideal delight to a boy.

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'Bello ovile dov' io dormii agnello;" of things beautiful besides men and women, dusty sunbeams up or down the street on summer mornings; deep-furrowed cabbage-leaves at the green-grocer's; magnificence of oranges in the wheelbarrows round the corner; and Thames's shore within three minutes' race.

None of these things very glorious: the best, however, that England, it seems, was then able to provide for a boy of gift; who, such as they are, loves them-never, indeed, forgets them. The short wants modify to the last his visions of Greek ideal. His fore-grounds had always a succulent cluster or two of green-grocery at the corners. Enchanted oranges gleam in Covent Gardens of the Hesperides; and great ships go to pieces in order to scatter chests of them on the waves. That mist of early sunbeams in the London dawn crosses, many and many a time, the clearness of Italian air; and by Thames' shore, with its stranded barges and glidings of red sail, dearer to us than Lucerne lake or Venetian lagoon,-by Thames' shore we will die.

With such circumstances round him in youth, let us note what necessary effects followed upon the boy. I assume him to have Giorgione's sensibility (and more than Giorgione's, if that be possible) to colour and form. I tell you farther, and this fact you may receive trustfully, that his sensibility to human affection and distress was no less keen than even his sense for natural beauty-heart-sight deep as eyesight.

Consequently, he attaches himself with the faithfullest child-love to everything that bears an image of the place he was born in. No matter

how ugly it is,—has it anything about it like Maiden-lane or like Thames shore? If so, it shall be painted for their sake. Hence, to the very close of life, Turner could endure uglinesses which no one else of the same sensibility would have borne with for an instant. Dead brick walls, blank square windows, old clothes, market-womanly types of humanity -anything fishy or muddy like Billingsgate or Hungerford Market had great attractions for him; black barges, patched sails, and every possible condition of fog.

You will find these tolerations and affections guiding or sustaining him till the last hour of his life; the notablest of all such endurances being that of dirt. No Venetian ever draws anything foul; but Turner devoted picture after picture to the illustration of effects of dinginess, smoke, soot, dust, and dusty texture; old sides of boots, weedy roadside vegetation, dung-hills, straw-yards, and all the soilings and stains of every common labour.

And more than this, he not only could endure but enjoyed and looked for litter, like Covent Garden wreck after the market. His pictures are often full of it, from side to side; their fore-grounds differ from all others in the natural way the things have of lying about in them. Even his richest vegetation, in ideal work, is confused; and he delights in shingle, débris, and heaps of fallen stones. The last words he ever spoke to me about a picture were in gentle exultation about his St. Gothard: "That litter of stones which I endeavoured to represent."

The second great result of this Covent Garden training was, understanding of and regard for the poor, whom the Venetians, we saw, despised; whom, contrarily, Turner loved, and more than loved-understood. He got no romantic sight of them, but an infallible one, as he prowled about the end of his lane, watching night effects in the wintry streets; nor sight of the poor alone, but of the poor in direct relations with the rich. He knew, in good and evil, what both classes thought of, and how they dealt with, each other.

Reynolds and Gainsborough, bred in country villages, learned there the country boy's reverential theory of "the squire," and kept it. They painted the squire and the squire's lady as centres of the movements of the universe, to the end of their lives. But Turner perceived the younger squire in other aspects about his lane, occurring prominently in its night scenery, as a dark figure, or one of two, against the moonlight. He saw also the working of city commerce, from endless warehouse, towering over Thames, to the back shop in the lane, with its stale herrings-highly interesting these last; one of his father's best friends, whom he often afterwards visited affectionately at Bristol, being a fishmonger and glueboiler; which gives us a friendly turn of mind towards herring-fishing, whaling, Calais poissardes, and many other of our choicest subjects in after life; all this being connected with that mysterious forest below London Bridge on one side;-and, on the other, with those masses of human power and national wealth which weigh upon us, at Covent Garden here, with strange compression, and crush us into narrow Handcourt.

"That mysterious forest below London Bridge"-better for the boy than wood of pine or grove of myrtle. How he must have tormented the watermen, beseeching them to let him crouch anywhere in the bows, quiet as a log, so only that he might get floated down there among the ships, and round and round the ships, and with the ships, and by the

ships, and under the ships, staring and clambering;-these the only quite beautiful things he can see in all the world, except the sky; but these, when the sun is on their sails, filling or falling, endlessly disordered by sway of tide and stress of anchorage, beautiful unspeakably; which ships also are inhabited by glorious creatures-red-faced sailors, with pipes, appearing over the gunwales, true knights, over their castle parapets the most angelic beings in the whole compass of London world. And Trafalgar happening long before we can draw ships, we, nevertheless, coax all current stories out of the wounded sailors, do our best at present to show Nelson's funeral streaming up the Thames, and vow that Trafalgar shall have its tribute of memory some day. Which, accordingly, is accomplished once, with all our might, for its death; twice, with all our might, for its victory; thrice, in pensive farewell to the old Téméraire, and, with it, to that order of things,

Now, this fond companying with sailors must have divided his time, it appears to me, pretty equally between Covent Garden and Wapping (allowing for incidental excursions to Chelsea on one side, and Greenwich on the other), which time he would spend pleasantly, but not magnificently, being limited in pocket-money, and leading a kind of "Poor Jack" life on the river.

Schooled thus in manners, literature, and general moral principles, at Chelsea and Wapping, we have finally to inquire the most important point of all the aspect of religion, namely, in the neighbourhood of Covent Garden. I say the aspect, for that was all the lad could judge by. Disposed, for the most part, to learn chiefly by his own eyes, in this special matter he finds there is really no other way of learning. His father taught him "to lay one penny upon another." Of mother's teaching we hear of none; of parish pastoral teaching, the reader may guess how much,

Under these influences pass away the first reflective hours of life, with such conclusion as they can reach. In consequence of a fit of illness, he was taken-I cannot ascertain in what year to live with an aunt at Brentford; and here, I believe, received some schooling, which he seems to have snatched vigorously; getting knowledge, at least by translation, of the more picturesque classical authors, which he turned presently to use, as we shall see. Hence also, walks about Putney and Twickenham in the summer time acquainted him with the look of English meadow-ground in its restricted states of paddock and park; and with some round-headed appearances of trees, and stately entrances to houses of mark; the avenue at Bushy, and the iron gates and carved pillars of Hampton, impressing him apparently with great awe and admiration; so that in after life his little country house is—of all places in the world—at Twickenham ! Of swans and reedy shores he now learns the soft motion and the green mystery, in a way not to be forgotten.

INDEX.