bury's less ambitious composition may be estimated from such passages as these:

'I can claim no "blue blood" for Turner; nor do I want to.'-i. 4. 'He is hopeless, is William Turner, the barber's son of Maidenlane.'-i. 51.

'He told the barber-who I can see listening to him-tongs and wig in hand.'-i. 57.

Turner was too cautious to tell many secrets; but he was not too proud to refuse to learn of any one.'-i. 158.

This year Turner had the bitter mortification of sending to the Exhibition the "Landing of William of Orange;" only Van Tromp selling.'-i. 321.

These last two sentences we can only understand by putting on them the very opposite sense to that which the words convey: 'sending to' seems to mean receiving back from. But Mr. Thornbury's more level style is frequently relieved by passages of bombastical rant, caricatured from the worst manners of Mr. Carlyle and Mr. Ruskin, with a mixture of Mr. Charles Reade, and of the grandiloquence which is supposed to belong to the dramatists of the Victoria Theatre. In his headings Mr. Thornbury, as well as Mr. Ruskin, appears to have aimed at puzzling instead of assisting the reader. But there is a characteristic difference between the two; for while in the 'Modern Painters' we are left to divine the meaning of 'The Angel of the Sea,' 'The Dark Mirror,' 'The Land of Pallas,' 'The Wings of the Lion,' 'The Nereid's Haunt,' 'The Hesperid Æglé,' and the like -the Life of Turner' presents us with such titles as (to quote from the head-lines of a single chapter) 'The Voyage of Discovery,' 'The Old Admiral,' 'Dying,'' Mysterious,' The Empty Rooms,' 'Revoking,' 'The Crows on the Carcase,' 'Issue Joined,' 'Law,' "Talk,' A Grateful Government,' Going to Begin,' 'Circumlocution,' Discussion,' Palaver,' 'Lumber.' For mouthy mysticism there is cockney pertness; and it is hard to say which is the more annoying. There is a continual parade of allusions or illustrations, which may commonly be traced to no wider a circle of learning than the Vicar of Wakefield' and a smattering of Boswell, a little of Pope, and a slight knowledge of Hogarth's prints, with such further information about the eighteenth century as may be gleaned from Lord Macaulay's 'Essays,' Mr. Thackeray, and Mr. Forster. Add to this some study of playbills and of exhibition catalogues, and the general literature necessary for the production of such a book will be pretty nearly complete. Mr. Thornbury's acquaintance with the classics may be tested by the facts that, after having enume

rated

rated from some guidebook the worthies connected with Maiden Lane, he tells us that the dirty lane has contributed its quota to the mythology of dear old London' (i. 9); that he loftily discourses on circumstance—the Nemesis of the Greeks' (i. 12); that he reports Mr. Jones to have written on the frame of one of Turner's idealised Italian views, 'Splendida mendax' (i. 228); that he displays his Greek by speaking of the awful primary verbs eimai and tupto' (i. 308), and by changing the name of Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon' into Eidophushion (i. 158); that (as we have seen) he turns the Golden Ass' from a prose romance into a poem; and that he has 'always thought the worst thing told of Caligula was his habit of spending leisure hours in pricking flies to death' (ii. 123). The accuracy of his acquaintance with older English literature is shown by quoting Ben Jonson as having said that Shakespeare had little Latin and less Greek (i. 309), and by twice telling us that the Pilgrim's Progress' contains a scene described as 'Faith of Perrin' (ii. 353, 363); the accuracy of his geographical knowledge, by his placing Orvieto on the Lake of Bolsena (i. 307); the accuracy of his acquaintance with Scripture, by telling us that when Turner's intention of founding a charity became known after his death, 'the great edifice of lies fell to dust, like the house built on the sand' (ii. 126).

*

For a specimen of Mr. Thornbury's picturesque manner we need not go further than the second and third paragraphs of the 'Life':

:

'His father, William Turner, a barber, well known in the district of the Garden, lived at the west end of Maiden-lane. . . . . Only a side door of the murky house is still extant, and that is now absorbed into the sticky warerooms of Mr. Parkin, an adjoining grocer, who has pushed his conquests even to Hand-court. Geographically considered, the consecrated house was No. 26, and stood on the left-hand corner of Hand-court, near the south-west corner of Covent Garden. This court is a sort of gloomy horizontal shaft, or paved tunnel, with a low archway and prison-like iron gate of its own.

'You must stand for some minutes in the quenched light of this archway before you can see the coffin-lid door to the left that led to the small barber's small shop in the days of Dr. Johnson. The front window, once grotesquely gay with dummies, such as Hogarth loved to stop and draw, is still extant.'—i. 1, 2.

Johnson and Hogarth are two of the personages whom writers

This is in a list of engravings after Turner, compiled by the late Mr. Stokes. 'Faith of Perrin' is evidently a printer's mistake, which Mr. Thornbury was unable to discover. The blunder arises out of the circumstance that the plate was used for a Welsh edition of Bunyan, as well as for the English-Taith y Pererin being the Welsh for The Pilgrim's Progress. 2 H 2

of

of this school (for there is a school of them) must drag in continually, without any sort of pretext; although why they should lavish their condescending fondness on Johnson, who of all men that ever lived would perhaps have been the least tolerant of such literature as theirs, we are quite unable to imagine. But we meet with the Doctor again and again; for example, when Turner was working in Reynolds's studio :

'Perhaps stern Dr. Johnson is on the easel-perhaps leering Laurence Sterne-perhaps nervous Dr. Beattie, Goldsmith, or that tremendous Marquis of Granby, the Mars Ultor [!] of inn-signsperhaps great Dr. Johnson may, in the course of the day, come in and peer at him as he works,' &c.-i. 64.

Now, as this scene is supposed to have taken place in 1789, we do not think it likely that Sir Joshua would have had on his easel the portraits of Sterne, who died in 1768, of Lord Granby, who died in 1770, of Goldsmith, who died in 1774, or of Johnson, who died in 1784; and if Johnson had made his personal appearance in the painting-room five years after his death, we may be sure that so remarkable a fact would not have been unrecorded by Boswell, whose taste for the supernatural was notoriously strong. But this is only an ordinary specimen of the strange anachronisms into which Mr. Thornbury continually falls when indulging the vicious fondness of his school for representing imaginary scenes. Nay, even when he has some better authority than his own imagination, Mr. Thornbury is unable to describe correctly. Thus, in relating that Turner visited Scotland in 1818, with a view to illustrating Scott's 'Provincial Antiquities,' he gives us a picture of the great novelist's study, which proves that he is too careless not only to copy statements with accuracy, but even to take the trouble of understanding a plain description:

'It is this very year,' says Mr. Thornbury, 'that Lockhart describes meeting Home Drummond in Scott's study in Castle-street.'—i. 182. On turning to the Life of Scott,' we find the real state of the case to have been that Lockhart met Scott for the first time at a dinner given by Mr. Home Drummond; and that, in consequence of a communication from Messrs. Ballantyne, the printers, he called in Castle Street a few days later, when he found Scott alone (v. 317-321, ed. 2). But let us observe what, according to Mr. Thornbury, was to be seen there :—

"The ground was strewn with folios and octavos (Comines for Quentin Durward," Pepys for "Peveril "). Scott sat at a desk with drawers, the top of which was covered with Sessions-papers, letters, proofs, red-tape, and green tin boxes.'

Mr. Thornbury evidently holds, with Osborne, in Vanity

Fair,' that a man of letters must be a 'littery man;' and this formidable picture is, doubtless, agreeable to his ideal of the habits which befit such a person. But Lockhart expressly tells us that Scott's habits were very different; and on looking at the original description we find that, instead of the confusion represented by Mr. Thornbury, everything is order. The green boxes were not on the desk, but piled over each other, on one side of the window.' The papers on the desk (or rather on the table, with which it was connected) were 'all neatly done up with' that same 'red tape' which Mr. Thornbury represents as an element straggling in the chaos; and instead of a floor 'strewn with folios and octavos,' we read in Lockhart that a dozen volumes or so, needful for immediate purposes of reference, were placed close by him on a moveable frame.'* But Mr. Thornbury allows his fancy to add, that among the books were Comines,' for Quentin Durward,' and Pepys,' for 'Peveril.' Unluckily, it so happens not only that the novels in question cannot have been in hand in 1818, as 'Peveril' was written in 1822, and Quentin Durward' in the following year; but that Pepys was not available for the composition of 'Peveril,' inasmuch as the 'Diary' did not appear until 1825. Of other blunders in connexion with Scott, and with Turner's visits to Scotland, we do not think it necessary to speak. But if this be the biographer's manner of dealing with an original which we know, what confidence can we place in him where we are unable to trace him to his authorities, or where his statements are made on verbal information?

6

Here is another pictorial scene, which we quote at length, with a view of enabling the reader to form some idea of Mr. Thornbury's taste, as well as of his accuracy :

'When Bird, the son of a Wolverhampton clothier, about 1811, first sent a picture to the Royal Academy-it might have been "Good News," or "Choristers Rehearsing," or some other of those early anticipations of Wilkie and Webster-Turner was one of the "Hanging Committee," as it was opprobriously called. Every one said the picture of the new man had great merit, but there was no place fit for it left unoccupied. Here was a desirable guest, but the inn was full. The R.A.s looked stolidly content, as people inside an omnibus on a wet day do when the conductor looks in at the window, and begs to know "if any jintleman would like to go outside and make room for a lady." The R.A.s joke and talk. The days of chivalry are past. Turner growls, and is disturbed; he up and says, "that come what may, the young man's picture must have a place." All the others cry "Impossible!" and go on talking about other things.

*Life of Scott, v. 321-3, ed. 1839.

'But

6

But can you stop the lion in mid-leap? Can you drive off a shark by shouting when his teeth have closed on your flesh? This is not a doll man of wax and saw-dust. This is not one of those committeecreatures whom lords and ministers pull with a red-tape string, so that it says "Yes" and "No," and rolls its eyes at the required moment. — This is a Nemean man [!]—a real, stern, honest man, staunch as an English bull-dog, and almost as pertinacious and indomitable.

All this time he is examining the picture-right, left, surface, clearobscure, touch, colour, character-carefully; he sees it is good: he cries out again, and hushes the buzz of voices.

"We must find a good place for this young man's picture."

"Impossible, impossible!" says the gold spectacles again, and more oracularly this time than before.

Turner said no more, but quietly removed one of his own pictures and hung up Bird's.'-ii. 111-2.

We do not undertake to say how much of this is truth; but by looking at the Academy catalogues, of which a set is (according to Mr. Thornbury's favourite phrase) buried in the British Museum,' but may be disinterred by any inquirer, it might have been easily ascertained that Bird's first picture exhibited in London was 'Good News,' in the year 1809. Although, however, the date is thus thrown back two years beyond the time mentioned by Mr. Thornbury, the picture was not an early antici pation of Wilkie;' for Wilkie, although younger than Bird, had been an exhibitor from 1806, became an Associate of the Academy in the year of Bird's first picture, and in the year 1811, to which Mr. Thornbury refers the scene, was elected an Academician Nor was the provincial painter really to be described by Turner as 'a young man,' although it is possible that Turner may have supposed him such; for his age in 1809 was thirty-seven, while Turner himself was then only thirty-four.

Perhaps, however, the most absurd of all Mr. Thornbury's ima ginary pictures is the following, for a reason which will presently appear. We are told of a letter

penned when Turner was about forty; and it described him as deeply in love with a lady. . . . . It was the letter of an affectionate, but shy and eccentric, man. It implored his friend to help him at his need; talked of soon coming down again; but expressed his fear that he should never find courage to pop the question unless the lady helped him out.'-ii. 40.

And then comes the following burst

'At last, then, we have sure proof that the passion of the boy had begun to fade out, as dint of the lightning-bolt will even out of granite; and once more Cupid had blown the old ashes into a flame. Tremble, ye tailless cats, in the dirty gallery of Queen Anne-street!

tremble,