A DEVONSHIRE MAN.

3

for one half of a double house, a Mrs. Hawkes renting the other at a like sum.

The assertion, therefore, of some writer (Mr. Cyrus Redding, in Fraser ?), that Turner used to say that he came up from Devonshire to London when he was very young, must be a mistake, as we find that his father was married in August, 1773, and he himself baptised in London in May, 1775. Perhaps Turner meant that it was his father who early in life came up from Barnstaple to London; or perhaps he purposely mystified Mr. Redding, as he did so many other people.

The date of Turner's birth is now beyond dispute, though the executors put the wrong age upon the painter's coffin. The register of the Covent Garden church proves it, and still more the following fact. In an extant drawing of Westminster Abbey (an interior), there is the following inscription, written by the artist himself, on a flat pavement stone in the left-hand foreground of the Abbey.*

WILLIAM TURner,

NATUS

1775.

But Turner loved to hide in a corner and mystify

*«Natus 1775," is ambitiously marked on a stone in the foreground pavement of this beautiful water-colour drawing of the interior of Westminster Abbey, bought by Mr. J. Dillon at the sale of Lord Harewood's pictures, in 1858. The colour of this drawing is a little blue, the figure introduced very graceful. The size of the Abbey is grandly exaggerated, yet one could scarcely wish it otherwise.

people. He sometimes talked of being born in the same year as Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington, and I have no doubt he wished he had been, though "St. George's Day" was surely just as much a day of good omen for the birth of a great Englishman.

Turner's grandfather and grandmother lived all their life at South Molton, in Devonshire. His father went to London early in life, became a hair-dresser, and married a young woman whose surname was Mallord (or Marshall), from whom the painter derived one of his Christian names. An uncle of the painter settled in Barnstaple, and became a wool-merchant. A descendant of this uncle is now principal clerk in one of the Barnstaple banks, and kindly furnishes me with these facts. He tells me he once called at the painter's house, but was refused admittance, as he believes all the painter's relatives were, if they ventured on a visit to the Gallery. Turner's assertion to Mr. Cyrus Redding, therefore, that he came from Barnstaple, was a mere generality, carelessly uttered, and perhaps carelessly reported. There is no doubt, however, that the painter was proud of belonging to the same county as Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose portrait he had once copied. I can claim no "blue blood " for Turner, nor do I want to. All old families have sprung originally from peasants; and every second peasant family will one day be noble. There is no rank in souls or bodies; and our heralds have now grown mere inventors of ancestors for uneasy men who have grown rich and wish to bear arms. Pedigree and genealogy-both are vanity, and I put them behind me as dead and gone.