30

POETRY OF LONDON.

hard and unconsciously to learn the A, B, C of great dame Nature.

Of the poetry of London itself we think that, then as in old age, Turner seems to have had no special discernment. Many of his boyish days were spent on the Thames with his friend Girtin, and of the sights there he kept good record-of the yellow and madder sails of the dragon-fly boats, all green and vermilion-of the shaky green-stained piles-of the crumbling old sheds and boat-houses of Lambeth, of the dull brick towers, and the massy bridge that flung itself across the dull river, he took careful note. Of all ripples, quivering reflections, gleams, and sparkling currents he remembered, whether under Temple Gardens, Savoy steps, Inigo Jones's gateway, or Old Swan landings; Strand side or Borough side, he knew them by heart. But he seems to have had no sense of the dumb grandeur of the myriads of houses over which the black globing dome dominates; the old gable-ends he never sketched; the memory-haunted places he did not care for; he could find nothing there in what seemed to him black windows and smoky streets, vaulted half the year with a sky of gloomy lead, to rouse his poetry or stimulate his imagination.

I do not wish to imitate that learned and industrious monk who, writing the life of St. Jerome, commenced with the siege of Troy.

Yet I do wish, before I follow Turner farther, to briefly convey some impression of the condition of England the year of Turner's birth, that my readers may thoroughly understand upon what stage Providence had placed him, and what was the condition of

the society in which he would have to work. We shall after this be the better able to judge if the times were really propitious or unpropitious to his genius and his art, and be able more clearly to see how far he led and how far he followed his age. In fact, we in this way obtain a standard by which to gauge his genius.

I confess it is rather soon to bait my untired horse at the wayside inn of an episode, and yet I purpose making this chapter episodical, because I do not wish to interrupt my biographical story by matter not strictly relevant; this chapter stands as a turnpike gate between Chapters I. and III. My readers can either walk through it or leap over it, according to their relative degrees of forbearance and patience.

Seventeen hundred and seventy-five was a very eventful year to England-perhaps the most eventful year to our dear country since that in which the great victories of Marlborough had taken place. It was the first year of the unhappy American war. It was the year that General Washington was appointed by Congress Commander-in-Chief of the American army. It was the year of the battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker's Hill. It was the year that a great colony was lost to England for ever, though much blood remained to be spilled, and many as yet un-opened graves to be dug before the issue was known, and America could boast that she was at last free.

It was a year that marked a great epoch in civilization; much, perhaps, as its events were lamented

32

TROUBLED WATERS.

over by the little barber of Maiden-lane and his tavern quidnuncs. In other countries besides America, unjust exactions and reckless misrule were breeding future evils even more terrible in their consequences, and less productive of unmitigated good. It was the of the coronation at Rheims of the young king of year France. But before the white clouds of incense had well died away from the vaulting of the great cathedral, and before the rejoicing anthems of the choristers ("Lift up your head, O ye gates, that the King of Glory may come in ") had well ceased to echo, the whole kingdom, from the Pyrenees to the gates of Paris, resounded with the clamours of starving mobs shouting for bread. The great net of Justice, that blind fisher in troubled waters, was cast out for her illtimed draught, and from cellar to "skull-cap" the loathsome Bastille was filled with all classes of victims-from serf to noble-from ploughman to priest; and amid the babble about Turgot's schemes of finance, amidst theories of reform by the "finality men" of those days, who were at last determined to end this clamour for progress and equality for good and all, these food rioters and their fate were forgotten; the coronation bells drowned their groans. groans. Of these food riots some meagre outline probably reached Maiden-lane, and they were discussed by barber and wife as they dandle little William between them, gently wrangling as to who shall have the greatest share of that pleasing toil.

Then Pope Ganganelli is dead; some say poisoned by those dreadful Jesuits who infest Italy; a vain old man, one Pius VI., reigns in his stead; and there

OLD KING GEORGE.

33

is much bowing of red-robed cardinals in the Vatican and on the Quirinal; and this year the Inquisition is abolished in Milan : so that the Ganganelli poison seems rather to have been wasted than otherwise.

Nearer home, the great Earl of Chatham-after much gout, much proud sulking down in the country, a final grand tableau in the House of Lords, and a noble protest against the American War, has laid down his coronet, that proved after all so hot and so heavy-has quietly died at Hayes, and been soldered up in his coronetted lead coffin, furnishing our barber with at least two days' chat.

In the mean time, amid all the fret and angry debates of Burke and Lord North, &c., about America, -"those misguided rebels"-King George III. (now twenty-five years on his uneasy throne) passes a quiet, dull, but really well-spent summer at Kew. He rises (good, honest, obstinate man) at six, breakfasts early, and sees the five eldest children set at their tasks, while the two little ones take a walk; while the Queen works the King reads to her; and then comes the children's dinner, which the worthy old pair always go and see; once a week the supposed model father accompanies them on a public promenade in Kew or Richmond-gardens, much to the admiration of the open-mouthed country people.

With stupid admiration, a Court chronicler of the day relates that the Prince and the future Bishop of Osnaburgh (scapegraces both) devoted eight hours a day with unremitting industry to languages and the liberal sciences. "They bid fair," the un

34

WILKES AND LIBERTY.

prophetic writer says, "to excel the generality of mankind in learning."

It is Horace Walpole who, describing the precious Prince at the same period, shows him to us a big boy with a childish frill round his neck, unnaturally restrained from all honest and healthy recreation, and in fair training for ruin whenever he can break out; such evil comes from laying too heavy burdens on poor weak average human nature.

Probably the worthy barber, lost in admiration of the quiet, unostentatious life King George (the royal patriarch) is leading down among the elm trees of Kew, is not aware of the fact that King George's poor broken-hearted sister, Queen Matilda of Denmark, has just died, unpitied and alone.

He, more probably, is all agog about the arrival of Captain Cook at Portsmouth from the South Seas; about the White-Boy ravages in Ireland; and about a clergyman of Bristol, who has just slipped by accident into that dreadful chasm-Pen Park Hole.

Or he is in great chatter over the new entertainment called "a Regatta," that some travelled dandies, or "maccaronis," as they are now called, have introduced in England from Venice, a city his new-born son will one day connect his great name with; he discusses whether that turbulent mocking fellow, John Wilkes, will be Lord Mayor again this November; or he reads in the papers great denunciations of that " savage diversion of cock-fighting."

But it is still more likely, as being more in the way of barber's gossip, that Mr. Turner of Maiden-lane, the year of his son's birth, was often discussing even