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Academical honours to exercise whatever private and personal influence they could command for the purpose of securing a preference over their competitors. Turner, although the inheritor of no aristocratical pride, had too much independence of spirit to follow this course; and, however desirous he might be of a position which confers such important privileges on an artist, he resolutely declined to "tout" for a diploma; and even refused, after it had been conferred, to comply with the ordinary custom of calling upon his supporters to thank them. On being assured by the timid and kind-hearted Stothard, that such a concession would be looked for at his hands, he bluffly replied, that he "would do nothing of the kind. If they had not been satisfied with his pictures, they would not have elected him. Why, then, should he thank them? Why thank a man for performing a simple duty ?"

Up to this time he was chiefly known as a painter in water-colours; but the applause which several of his oil pictures had obtained decided him on devoting his chief attention to the more durable medium, and his paintings of 'Ships Bearing-up for Anchorage,' 'Fishermen upon a Lee Shore in stormy weather,' and 'Kilchurn Castle with the Cruachaen Bien,' added very materially to his reputation, and fully confirmed the judgment which had raised him to the higher honours of the Academy.

It was in the latter part of 1802 that he took his first continental trip, on a sketching tour through France and Switzerland; and accordingly, among his contributions to the Exhibition of 1803, we find besides two views of Bonneville in Savoy, the Inauguration Scene of the Vintage of Maçon,' 'Calais Pier, the English Packet arriving,' the 'Valley of Aoust,' and the Glacier and Source of the Arveiron.' In 1804 he exhibited only three pictures, one of

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them the well known 'Narcissus and Echo,' now at Petworth, and a sea-piece. In 1805 he was absent from England, on the Rhine and in Switzerland, and exhibited nothing; and in 1806 the only memorial of his tour which he supplied to that year's exhibition was the Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen.' It had been for several years past his practice to insert in his landscape compositions some scene of classical mythology, by way of dignifying it with a sounding name; but with the fear of Mr. Ruskin vividly before us, we cannot admit that the character of the picture was ever much improved by the odd-looking figures in the foreground, which he introduced on such occasions. Nothing could exceed in beauty the poetry of his landscape, but the sentiment of a noble composition was often disturbed by groups, added for the mere purpose of helping him to a name for the picture.

Sometimes, however, as in his picture of the Country Blacksmith disputing with a butcher about the price charged for shoeing a pony, the figures are entirely subservient to some powerful effect connected with them, and then they are intelligible enough. Without a blacksmith we could not of course have had his forge, and without his forge there would have been no excuse for that powerful effect which he was so well skilled to produce. The Athenæum has an interesting anecdote relating to this picture which we will quote :-" In 1807 Turner exhibited two pictures evidently with a view to display his command over effects, 'The Sun rising through vapour, fishermen cleaning and selling fish,'-and, more extraordinary still, 'A Country Blacksmith disputing on the price of iron and the price charged to the butcher for shoeing his pony,' two pictures which 'killed' every picture within the range of their effects. Oddly enough, a modest picture thus injured by

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being hung between the two fires was, 'The Blind Fiddler, -the second exhibited picture of Wilkie-then a lad raw from Scotland contriving to exist, without getting into debt, on eighteen shillings a week. Turner, it is said, on the varnishing day set apart for the privileged body to which he belonged, reddened his sun, and blew the bellows of his art on his blacksmith's forge, 'to put the Scotchman's nose out of joint who had gained so much reputation by his 'Village Politicians.'' The story is told, without naming Turner, in Allan Cunningham's 'Life of Wilkie,'-and is condemned as an untruth by the reviewer of the Life in the Quarterly Review. But there is no doubt of the correctness of the story; and that Wilkie remembered the circumstance with some acerbity, though he never resented it openly, as we can ourselves undertake to say. When 'The Forge' was sold at Lord Tankerville's sale, Wilkie was in Italy; and Collins, the painter, in describing the sale to him in a MS. letter now before us, adds, 'And there was your old enemy, The Forge.'

On the other hand, we are assured, as a proof that Turner, was incapable of acting so ungenerously, that on one occasion he positively impaired the effect of a favorite landscape for the purpose of avoiding an interference with a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence. But if, as the Athenæum justly remarks, Sir Thomas, in the full blaze of his reputation, was sensitive on such a subject, what must have been the feelings of a poor Scotch youth, who was striving to obtain a reputation on which his future subsistence depended? If there be any real foundation for the story, its probability is by no means diminished by the fact that Turner was more forbearing to the powerful and courtly president of the Roya Academy, then the great dispenser of art patronage,

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than to a poor and unfriended man of genius struggling for the very means of existence. Had Turner persisted in out-flaring Sir Thomas, the bland but caustic president would have found abundant opportunities of resenting the injury. So long as an exclusive body of painters confine to themselves the privilege of heightening the colour of their pictures after they are hung up, to the disparagement of those of less favoured aspirants which may happen to be near them, the "outsider" has little chance of exhibiting his art with advantage. It is to this practice, and the freedom with which the "elect" avail themselves of it, we owe the fact that the great room of the Royal Academy is often more like the window of a chemist's shop than a picture-gallery.

It demanded, however, no malice prepense on the part of Mr. Turner to overpower the effect of the pictures which might happen to be placed in juxtaposition with his own, for his extravagant application of "orange chrome" was calculated to "kill," as painters have it, everything around. It was one of the oft-repeated jests of the late Mr. Chantrey, to affect to be warming his hands before the hottest of Mr. Turner's pictures; and on one occasion he carried his badinage so far, as to ask him, in the presence of several members of their body, whether it was true that he had a commission to paint a picture for the Sun Fire Office. Turner had, however, no great ground of complaint, as

1 Mr. Peter Cunningham, in his interesting memoir prefixed to Mr. Burnet's Essay on the works of Turner, relates another anecdote of his intolerance of all violent colour save that in his own pictures. In 1827, when he exhibited his 'Rembrandt's Daughter' in a red robe, the portrait of a member of one of the universities was hung beside it with a college gown still redder. Upon finding this out on varnishing day, Turner was observed to be busily occupied in increasing the glare of the lady's gown. "What are you doing there, Turner ?" asked one of the managers; "Why you've checkmated me," was the reply, pointing to the university gown, " and I must now checkmate you.”

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he had himself shortly before enacted the practical joke of standing beneath an open umbrella before one of Constable's rain-charged landscapes. The sarcasm was, therefore, little more than a conversion of his own joke.

In selecting fancy subjects for his early pictures, Thomson appears to have been Turner's favorite poet, although at that period, as well as at a later date, he selected many of his subjects from Milton. Only a few years ago, indeed, he illustrated a new edition of our great English epic, but his groups from Paradise and Pandemonium do not seem to have been much approved. For many of his finest pictures, however, he selected mottoes for the Academy Catalogue from an unpublished poem of his own, entitled, "The Fallacies of Hope;' and never was a fallacy more conspicuous than his notion that he was likely to pass for a poet. It has been the weakness of many great geniuses to be careless of the fame they have legitimately earned, and to grasp at laurels to which they have not the shadow of a claim. More crazy-crambo than the samples he has given us, from year to year, of his opus magnum, it is difficult to conceive. The Fallacies of Hope' would seem to have furnished the staple of his inspiration for nearly forty years. Whatever the subject of his picture, Hannibal Passing the Alps,' the 'Val d'Aouste,' 'Caligula's Palace,' the 'Vision of Medea,' the Golden Bough,' 'A Slave Ship,' 'A Funeral at Sea,' 'An Exile and Rock Limpet,' the Opening of the Walhalla,' 'Venice,' the 'Deluge,' 'Æneas and Dido,' its title was usually followed by a quotation from the 'Fallacies of Hope.' Nay, he even painted a very beautiful picture, the Fountain of Fallacy,' for the purpose of giving his Fallacies' a local habitation and a name, yet we now learn that no such poem ever existed.

From 1790, besides a great number of pictures, (not