stingy, if we may judge by the story of his following a customer down Maiden Lane to recover a halfpenny which he omitted to charge for soap, and from his son’s statement that his “Dad” never praised him for anything but saving a halfpenny. As barbers are proverbially talkative, and as persons do not generally develop cheerfulness in later life, we may consider Mr. Trimmer’s portrait of the old man to be essentially correct of him when young, especially as we find that Turner the younger was always “old looking,” a peculiarity which is generally hereditary.

The house (now pulled down) in which Turner was born, and in which, for at least some time after, father, mother, and son resided together, is thus described by Mr. Ruskin: “Near the south-west corner of Covent Garden, a square brick pit or well is formed by a close-set block of houses, to the back windows of which it admits a few rays of light. Access to the bottom of it is obtained out of Maiden Lane, through a low archway and an iron gate; and if you stand long enough under the archway to accustom your eyes to the darkness, you may see, on the left hand, a narrow door, which formerly gave access to a respectable barber’s shop, of which the front window, looking into Maiden Lane, is still extant.” Maiden Lane is not a very brilliant thoroughfare, and was still narrower and darker at this time, but still this picture, though doubtless accurate, seems to make it still darker, and in the engraving of the house in Thornbury’s life of Turner, even the front window that looked into Maiden Lane is rendered ominously black by the shadow of a watchman thrown up by his low-held lantern. To us it seems that there is plenty of dark in Turner’s life without thus unduly heightening the gloom of his first dwelling-place. A barber cannot do his work without light, and we have no doubt that whatever sorrow fell upon Turner in his life was in no way deepened by his having to pass through a low archway and an iron gate in order to get to his father’s shop.

HOUSE IN MAIDEN LANE IN WHICH TURNER
WAS BORN.

The house in Maiden Lane would have been a cheerful enough and a wholesome enough nest for little William[4] if it had contained a happy family presided over by a sweetly smiling mother. This want is the real dark porch and iron gateway of his life, the want which could never be supplied. In that wonderful memory of his, so faithful, by all accounts, to all places where he had once been happy, there was no chamber stored with sweet pictures of the home of his youth; no exhaustless reservoir of tender, healthy sentiment, such as most of us have, however poor. Here is a note of pathos on which we might dwell long and strongly without fear of dispute or charge of false sentiment. Children, indeed, do not miss what they have not: present sorrows did not probably affect his appetite, future forebodings did not dim his hopes; but then, and for ever afterwards, he was terribly handicapped in the struggle for peace and happiness on earth, in his desire after right thinking and right doing, in his aims at self-development, in his chance of wholesome fellowship with his kind, in his capacity for understanding others and making himself understood, for all these things are more difficult of attainment to one who never has known by personal experience the charm of what we mean by “home.”

This want in his life runs through his art, full as it is of feeling for his fellow-creatures, their daily labour, their merry-makings, their fateful lives and deaths; there is at least one note missing in his gamut of human circumstance—that of domesticity. He shows us men at work in the fields, on the seas, in the mines, in the battle, bargaining in the market, and carousing at the fair, but never at home. This is one of the principal reasons why his art has never been truly popular in home-loving domestic England.

It is not good for man, still less for a boy, to be alone, and we do not think we can be wrong in thinking that he was a solitary boy. How soon he became so we do not know. We may hope that in his earliest years at least he was tenderly cared for by his mother, and petted by his father. There is no reason why we may not draw a bright picture of his childhood, and fancy him walking on Sundays with his father and mother in the Mall of St. James’s Park, wearing a short flat-crowned hat with a broad brim over his curly brown hair, with snowy ruffles round his neck and wrists, and a gay sash tied round his waist, concealing the junction between his jacket-waistcoat and his pantaloons; but this bright period cannot have lasted long. Soon he must have been driven upon himself for his amusement, and fortunate it was for him that nature provided him with one wholesome and endless.

It is known that one artist, Stothard, was a customer of his father, and it is probable that as there was an academy in St. Martin’s Lane, and the Society of Artists at the Lyceum, and many artists resided about Covent Garden, the little boy’s emulation may have been excited by hearing of them, and perhaps chatting with them and seeing their sketches.

He certainly began very early. We are told that he first showed his talent by drawing with his finger in milk spilt on the teatray, and the story of his sketching a coat-of-arms from a set of castors at Mr. Tomkison’s the jeweller, and father of the celebrated pianoforte maker, must belong to a very early age.[5] The earliest known drawing by him of a building is one of Margate Church, when he was nine years old, shortly before he went to his uncle’s at New Brentford for change of air. There he went to his first school and drew cocks and hens on the walls, and birds, flowers, and trees from the school-room windows, and it is added that “his schoolfellows, sympathizing with his taste, often did his sums for him, while he pursued the bent of his compelling genius.” Very soon after this, if not before, he began to make drawings, some of these copies of engravings coloured, which were exhibited in his father’s shop window at the price of a few shillings, and he drew portraits of his father and mother, and of himself at an early age. It is said that his father intended him to be a barber at first,[6] but struck with his talent for drawing soon determined that he should follow his bent and be a painter. He is said to have delighted in going into the fields and down the river to sketch, but all the very early drawings we have seen, including those purchased at his father’s shop, are drawings of buildings, mostly in London. Of these there is one of the interior of Westminster Abbey, in Mr. Crowle’s edition of “Pennant’s London,” now in the print room of the British Museum. There is nothing to distinguish these from the work of any clever boy, but this drawing and one in the National Gallery, of a scene near Oxford, both probably copied from prints, show a sense not only of light but colour. We have also seen a copy of Boswell’s “Antiquities of England and Wales,” with about seventy of the plates very cleverly coloured by