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

They walk out two and two, and on Sundays dazzle

eye 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, hẹ 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 dirty and confined they may have been. Turner's bedroom,

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.

THE MARGATE HOY.

25

set, and with large but handsome features; clear grey-blue eyes and arched eyebrows; careless in dress, and generally a sturdy, determined, prudent boy, with an irresistible bias towards art. For I know not what reason, father determines now to send William to his third school, a Mr. Coleman's, at Margate, probably in the hoy immortalized by Charles Lamb. A dreary, blundering, miserable journey of a flock of huddled-together sea-sick citizens' wives and children, yet most eventful to the lad. There was, firstly, that great happiness to one of the smoked London million, pure, fluent, sapphire air; next, sunlit waves washing off and breaking in green sparkles over the gunwale; then sails luminous with transverse sunbeams and other delights to the artisteye.

Margate then must have seemed a wild, little seaside village, at a vast distance from London, and schooling, no doubt, was cheap there. Turner formed an acquaintance there with the pleasant family of a favourite schoolfellow. No wonder he retained to the end of his life an ardent love for the breezy piers and white-walled cliffs of that Kentish bathing-place; for it was there he first saw the sea, there he first learnt the physiognomy of the waves, and there, too, he first fell in love, that great revolution in the mind of youth, that temporary restoration to the lost Eden.

It was with a sister of a schoolfellow that the boy-painter fell headlong into love. She was about his own age. Close friendship now began the basis of a future love. But more of this anon.

CHAPTER II.

THE LONDON OF TURNER'S BOYHOOD.

TINTORETTO was the son of a dyer, Andrea del Sarto and the Caracci were sons of tailors, Caravaggio was the son of a mason, Correggio of a labourer, Guido of a musician, Domenichino of a ropemaker, Albano of a silk-mercer, so Turner had good precedent for being born the son of a barber-it was his only chance of being original; had he been a great man's son in that artificial age, he might have grown up a third-rate imitator of Berghem or Hobbima, and have frittered away his life lounging in the galleries of Rome or Florence. But the hard necessity of earning bread, put steel into his blood, made him a Titan for work, a lion for exertion, and filled him with an all-absorbing love of nature. Thus there was no luxury or social frivolity to weaken or impair him; all his boyhood passed in the little Maiden-lane shop, and there by contrast he learnt ardently to thirst for the fresh air and green fields.

An old

Let us see what the shop contained. writer describing the barbers' shops in Exeter-change, catalogues the contents of them as consisting of long