tremble, old sordid housekeeper! for your new mistress comes to scatter yo to the four winds, with Hope, and Love, and Joy, winged and rosy cherubs, careering before her in the air, and the bright crescent of the honeymoon rising to shed blessed influences on the roof of a house once more awakened to life.

'But, no; cruel fate stepped in,' &c.-Ib.

This foolish rant would have been bad enough in any case; but in truth the whole idea of an intended marriage is founded on an utter misunderstanding of the letter. Here is the passage in question:

Sandycombe [Turner's house at Twickenham] sounds just now in my ears as an act of folly, when I reflect how little I have been able to be there this year, and less chance (perhaps for the next). In [I am?] looking forward to a continental excursion . . . if Miss would but waive bashfulness, or, in other words, make an offer, instead of expecting one, the same might change occupiers.'-ii. 41, 42.

The meaning of this must be clear to every one but Mr. Thornbury. It has nothing to do with marriage, although, by way of humour, the painter talks of waiving bashfulness.' In short, the offer which he wishes the lady to make is not that of her hand, but of a price or a rent for Sandycombe Lodge; the result which he contemplates is not that his town-house might receive a mistress, but that there might be a change of occupiers' in his country-house.

'I do not,' says Mr. Thornbury, 'wish to imitate that learned and industrious monk who, writing the life of St. Jerome, commenced with the siege of Troy' (i. 30). Whether there ever was such a monk, or what Mr. Thornbury's idea of St. Jerome may be, we do not care to inquire; but we have certainly never met with any book so full of irrelevant matter. Thus the second chapter is entitled The London of Turner's Boyhood,' and contains an account of the capital— the vast, the negative, the miserable, the loathsome, the great, the magnificent' (i. 22)— which might equally well figure as the London of Johnson's old age, or of Lord Eldon's early manhood, or of any other man's boyhood who was born about 1775,-when, as we are told with the author's usual accuracy, George III. had been twenty-five years on his uneasy throne' (i. 33). But, not content with this, Mr. Thornbury launches out into an account of the most remarkable things of that year-not only in London, but all over the world, including the American Revolution; and as his picture of London seems to be mainly borrowed from a book by Smith, the biographer of Nollekens, so the general view of the year is taken (of course without acknowledgment) from the Annual

Register.'

6

6

Register.' Thus the account of Court life at Kew (i. 33) is from Pt. ii. of the Register,' pp. 1-2; the mention of the regatta as 'a new entertainment, introduced from Venice' (i. 34), is from the Register,' Pt. i. p. 216; and the record of a very old man's death (i. 36) is from Pt. i. p. 87; although Mr. Thornbury could not help improving even this, by changing the name from Garden to Gordon, adding a year to the age, and describing 'the parish of Auchterless, North Britain,' as 'a village in the north of England!'

Almost equally superfluous is the chapter on 'Turner's Contemporaries in Water and Oil,' or, at least, the greater part of it; and we need hardly say that it is full of blunders. Then come two chapters of which Girtin is the chief hero; chapters which fill almost forty pages, but of which the whole substance might be very well given in five.

Here is a specimen, remarkable alike for consistency and good

taste:

'Girtin has been very unfairly set down as a careless, dissolute artist, fond of low society. Nothing can be more untrue. Far be it from me to sneer at Girtin's loving humour and adventure, or going to Northumberland in a dirty collier, eating salt-beef, smoking black pipes, and bandying North-country jokes. A young prig of a dandy would have maintained a dogged silence, except now and then to quote the Greek "Delectus," and express his nausea and disgust at the general filthiness of the vessel, and the boorishness of the "plebs,” the "hoi polloi," the "crew." The one would have been dubbed " cursed jackanapes," the other have been cheered at parting as "a right good-hearted fellow as ever trod shoe-leather."-i. 110, 111.

Girtin's last illness is thus described :

'But gradually the bony hand came nearer and nearer, pushing him onwards towards the clean, square-cut grave. Fame might put by his crown; it was not to be for him.'—i. 115.

And, as if it were not enough to have uttered this trash once, we have it again on the very next page:

:

But, alas there was both a good and an evil genius attending Girtin as he stood at the easel, or as he sat over his wine. Before his eyes there was a bright-winged Fame stretching a golden crown; behind his back a black skeleton stretching a bony claw.' No wonder that, when this is the style of composition, the material of five pages should have been swollen out to thirty-seven!

In chapter ix. we once more go back beyond the beginning, to trace the Rise and Progress of Water-Colour Painting in England,' from the illuminations of Anglo-Saxon missals downwards, through those who, with a beautiful display of Scriptural knowledge,

knowledge, are indifferently styled patriarchs' and preAdamites (e. g. i. 81); and although much of this is a repetition of things which had been said before, we are favoured with an unexpected novelty in Mr. Thornbury's notes on a late exhibition of water-colours (i. 139, 140). A little further on there is an account of Loutherbourg's Eidophuskion' (as Mr. Thornbury calls it) a sort of dioramic exhibition, with which Turner had nothing whatever to do (i. 158-161). Then in chapter xiii.'Turner's Work for the Engravers '-we have a history of Engraving in England, executed in the usual fashion. There is a list of early engravers at p. 243, which is almost repeated at p. 245. There is much repetition of former details as to Turner's illustrations of Scott, and of the places which he visited in order to make drawings for the engravers. And there are blunders and contradictions in plenty. Basire is always turned into Basile. The painter Cipriani is spoken of as if he were an engraver (p. 245). We are told in one place that Woollett was born in 1755 (p. 243), and in two other places that he was born in 1735 (pp. 246, 383). 'From 1780,' it is said, 'Rooker, Ryland, Strange, and Woollett began to get patronage. In 1751 Strange commenced his series of copies from the old masters' (p. 244). According to this account, we might suppose that poor Strange had to work uncheered by the encouragement of patrons for nine and twenty years; but from a statement in the next page, that he died in 1772, it would seem that his probation was shortened, and that the patronage did not begin until he had been eight years in his grave. In either case the story would be so sad that we wonder how Mr. Thornbury can have restrained himself from moralising on it. But for the comfort of readers we may state from another source that the Jacobite engraver lived to be knighted by the Hanoverian George III. in 1787, and enjoyed his dignity until 1795.*

In chapter xviii., Turner's choice of Polyphemus for a subject is made the pretext for an analysis of the ninth book of Pope's 'Odyssey.' Chapter xxii., on Turner's Note-Books and Sketches,' is without any arrangement, and is in great part repeated from the notices of his tours and from Mr. Ruskin's description of the state in which his drawings were found after his death; and then, by way of a finish to the chapter, we are furnished with a set of dates in the lives of 'Turner's contemporaries,' with a 'Table of historical dates' in English history, a like table of French history, and one of 'Our great naval victories!' Really it

We need hardly commend here the very amusing Life of Strange, with the account of his remarkable wife, by the late Mr. Dennistoun.

is difficult to see, on this principle of stuffing, how any book should ever come to an end at all. Among the 'contemporaries,' whose names are arranged in no sort of order, are reckoned Reynolds, who ceased to paint when Turner was fourteen; Gainsborough, who died when Turner was thirteen; and Scott, the marine painter, who died three years before Turner was born! (i. 380.) As for the correctness of the dates, it will be enough to say that Sir William Allan is described as a fellow-pupil of Wilkie,' and yet as born in 1815; that Mr. Maclise is said to have become R.A. at twenty, and that Sir Edwin Landseer is said to have attained the same honour at the very early age of five—having, as it would seem, contributed to exhibitions for some years before his birth! * As in an extract which we have already given, Bird is here described as 'a predecessor of Wilkie;' but whereas he was there styled the son of a clothier,' he is here ‘a carpenter's son' (i. 381). Then, as if Mr. Thornbury's own account of the so-called 'contemporaries' were not enough, we have, in vol. ii. 57 seqq., about thirty pages of twaddling reminiscences, traditions, and remarks about them by Mr. Trimmer, which even Mr. Thornbury himself confesses to be somewhat irrelevant;' and, on the principle of St. Jerome's biographer, we are further favoured with confused and unintelligible histories of the societies of artists which have been formed in England (ii. 100 sqq.), and of the charities for the benefit of artists (ii. 271). Whatever Turner was in any way connected with, of that his biographer seems to think himself entitled to inflict a loose, flimsy, and inaccurate account on us; except, indeed (which we thankfully acknowledge), that the chapter of extracts from Turner's verses is not preceded by a history of English poetry.

The iteration in which Mr. Thornbury indulges is beyond anything that we have ever seen, and, if this feature were removed, the book would shrink very considerably. Thus in vol. i. chap. xii. we have seven pages by Mr. Cyrus Redding about a tour with Turner in Devonshire (pp. 201-8); and immediately after we have another expanded version of the same tour by the same pen, which fills eleven pages (208-219). We are told twice (if not oftener) of the rapidity with which Turner executed an elaborate drawing for Mr. Fawkes (i. 134, ii. 88); twice, that Turner engaged to work for a publisher named Walker, and that Girtin refused (i. 75, 107); twice that Turner would not allow his lawyer to distrain for the rent of some houses (ii. 122, 133);

* 'Maclise, born 1811, 1831, R.A.; Sir E. Landseer, born 1826, R.A., in 1831' (i. 383).

twice that nearly all his illustrations of Scott belong to Mr. Munro (i. 192, 196); twice that a woman employed to stitch up the Liber Studiorum' stole some of the prints (i. 274, 409); thrice, that Turner would never verify the genuineness of pictures ascribed to him (i. 408; ii. 152, 248); thrice that he designed the doorway of his house in Queen Anne Street (i. 166; ii. 173, 177); thrice that a copy of the Liber Studiorum' has been sold for 30007.* (i. 271, 274, 286); twice that Charles Turner, the engraver, burnt many proof impressions of the plates, in ignorance of their value (i. 271, 287); twice that the painter was excessively obstinate, with a story from Petworth in each case (ii. 156, 160); times without number that he was not mean, but generous-not recluse, but social; and that he intended the picture of Carthage for his winding-sheet: and these are but a few out of many instances. Phrases on which the author prides himself are repeated before the reader can have had time to forget them; we have had an instance in the passages already quoted as to the 'bony claw.' So, we are told at vol. ii., p. 85, that in the drawing-room at Farnley, 'shining yet like a sun, is the great picture of Dort;' and at p. 89, that the collection has for its sun the luminous Dort.' But perhaps the most startling instance of iteration within a very small compass is contained in two lines of vol. i., p. 381: Geddes, a Scotchman, was born 1789, and died 1844. He went to Italy in 1828, and died 1844.'

Sometimes, however, the repetition is not without some variety. Thus, in vol. i. p. 330, we read that 'in 1837 he [Turner] : painted "Regulus leaving Rome." This picture was painted at Rome in 1829.' In one place we are told that an artist named Dayes'got embarrassed, and committed suicide, it was supposed, from envy at the progress of his contemporariesTurner and his old pupil [Girtin]' (i. 102). But in the next page it is said that years after Girtin's death he committed suicide under the pressure of debts,' although 'jealousy at the success of his contemporaries is said to have been one of the accelerating causes of his dreadful death;' and somewhat later that, getting embarrassed and in debt, he killed himself about two years after Girtin's death' (i. 116). That a man should have killed himself out of envy of a deceased pupil, is certainly not very likely. And there is reason to believe that the whole account of this unfortunate artist is a gross misrepresentation.

* This turns out to be incorrect. See a letter from Mr. Pye, the engraver, in the Athenæum' of March 1. Mr. Wornum makes the more credible statement that the best collections of proofs, containing the plates in more than one state, are valued at from 2001, to 500-Memoir, p. xi.