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MOVING A BRIDGE.

story a mere excuse for gorgeous dreams of mountain piles of Greek temples and palaces, for Agrippina did not really land at Rome with the ashes, but at Brundusium, on the Adriatic.

The painter, exercising his royal prerogative, as usual, to the full, has moved the palace of the Cæsars from the left to the right bank of the Tiber to suit his composition. As usual also in the later pictures, the colour is gorgeous, but the form of things defective. The bridge, too, is inaccurately placed.

CHAPTER XX.

THE OLD TÉMÉRAIRE.

FROM the day that, as a boy, he first boated up and down the Thames, to the day that, at Chelsea, he turned his dying eyes on the river that he loved, Turner had all an Englishman's love for the water.

He had been born on the banks of a great river; his first school was situated close to the Thames; he lived much on the ocean; he beat about year after year in all sorts of smuggler boats; he cruised a good deal by sea, round our own coast and many other coasts; and he breathed his last close to the very spot where he had repaired as a boy to make his first sketches.

He loved the Thames and its "black barges, patched red sails, and every possible condition of blue and white fog;" he loved them, because he had a tenacious love all his life through for what had been known to him in childhood. His early visit to his uncle the fishmonger and glue-boiler at Bristol must have confirmed Turner's maritime tastes.

Mr. Ruskin imagines that much of Turner's youth was spent "in that mysterious forest" of masts below London Bridge, in cheap "poor Jack" trips among

seafaring people at Chelsea, or the other way, at Greenwich and Deptford. This could not have improved Turner's manners or morality. Long after, the fishwives of Billingsgate gave coarseness to his rendering of the female form; long afterwards his morality was regulated by the sailor's standard.

Yet the training had its value; it gave him early a deep knowledge of a ship's movement, and of a ship's anatomy; he knew how vessels would balance in any weather. It gave him such a love for a ship that after his death a whole press was found full of sketches of boats and vessels. I can fancy him as a boy saving up shillings to spend on boats, to go and watch the floating castles.

It was this early love for ships and sailors that led him to paint so many storms and shipwrecks, and so many salvage boats; to give us the "Battle of Trafalgar" and the "Old Téméraire being towed to her last Moorings." I cannot find a better place than here to insert an admirable anecdote furnished to Mr. Ruskin, by the Rev. Mr. Kingsley.

He says:

"I had taken my mother and a cousin to see Turner's pictures, and as my mother knows nothing about art, I was taking her down the gallery to look at the large Richmond Park;' but as we were passing theSnow Storm,' she stopped before it, and I could hardly get her to look at any other picture; and she told me a great deal more about it than I had any notion of, though I have seen many snow-storms. She had been in such a scene on the coast of Holland during the war. When, some time afterwards, I

LASHED TO THE MAST.

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thanked Turner for his permission for her to see the pictures, I told him that he would not guess what had [most] caught my mother's fancy, and then named the picture; but he said,

666

"I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like. I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it. I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape; but I felt bound to record it if I did. But no one

had

any business to like the picture.' "But,' said I, 'my mother once went through just such a scene, and it brought it all back to her.' Is your mother a painter?'

"'No.'

"Then she ought to have been thinking of something else.'

"These were nearly his words. I observed at the time he used 'record' and 'painter,' as the title author' had struck me before."

This anecdote shows us Turner in his most heroic mood, forgetful of all danger in the pursuit of his art. It is in this position that I should have liked to have seen him represented by the sculptor in his monument in St. Paul's.

The Téméraire picture was exhibited by Turner at the Royal Academy in 1839. The subject was suggested to the painter by Stanfield. In 1838 Turner was with Stanfield and a party of brother artists on one of those holiday excursions in which he so delighted, probably to end with whitebait and champagne at Greenwich. It was at these times that Turner talked and joked his best, snatching now and

336

THE WHITEBAIT DINNER.

then a moment to print on his quick brain some tone of sky, some gleam of water, some sprinkling light of oar, some glancing sunshine cross-barring a sail. Suddenly there moved down upon the artists' boat the grand old vessel that had been taken prisoner at the Nile, and that led the van at Trafalgar. She loomed pale and ghostly, and was being towed to her last moorings at Deptford by a little fiery, puny steam-tug.

“There's a fine subject, Turner," said Stanfield. So Turner painted it, and it proved one of his most poetical pictures.

Concerning the name of the picture the following anecdote is related:

"In consequence of the prominent part the Téméraire took in the battle of Trafalgar, she was called among the sailors the fighting Téméraire,' although she had never before or after the battle of Trafalgar a claim to the popular epithet; but Turner had so often heard her called 'the fighting Téméraire,' that the name became to him a household word, and as such he entitled his poetical and beautiful picture when it was exhibited. But when the plate was engraved for the Royal Gallery of British Art, and it became necessary to give a brief but authentic history of the ship, and the truth was stated to Turner, he seemed almost in tears when he gave up his pet title, and said, 'Call her, then, the Old Téméraire.'"

The assertion that the "Fighting Téméraire" had no claim to the title but for its doings at Trafalgar, is a mere bit of malice, to detract from Turner's sensibility. The Téméraire had doubtless had its rubs