ning. And they lived happily ever afterward.

Turner was small, and in appearance plain. Yet he was big enough to paint
a big picture, and he was not so homely as to frighten away all beautiful
women. But Philip Gilbert Hamerton tells us, "Fortunate in many things,
Turner was lamentably unfortunate in this: that throughout his whole life
he never came under the ennobling and refining influence of a good
woman."

Like Plato, Michelangelo, Sir Isaac Newton and his own Claude Lorraine,
he was wedded to his art. But at sixty-five his genius suddenly burst
forth afresh, and his work, Mr. Ruskin says, at that time exceeded in
daring brilliancy and in the rich flowering of imagination, anything that
he had previously done. Mr. Ruskin could give no reason, but rumor says,
"A woman."

The one weakness of our hero, that hung to him for life, was the idea
that he could write poetry. The tragedian always thinks he can succeed in
comedy; the comedian spends hours in his garret rehearsing tragedy; most
preachers have an idea that they could have made a quick fortune in
business, and many businessmen are very sure that if they had taken to
the pulpit there would now be fewer empty pews. So the greatest
landscape-painter of recent times imagined himself a poet. Hamerton says
that for remarkable specimens of grammar, spelling and construction
Turner's verse would serve well to be given to little boys to correct.

One spot in Turner's life over which I like to linger is his friendship
with Sir Walter Scott. They collaborated in the production of "Provincial
Antiquities," and spent many happy hours together tramping over Scottish
moors and mountains. Sir Walter lived out his days in happy ignorance
concerning the art of painting, and although he liked the society of
Turner, he confessed that it was quite beyond his ken why people bought
his pictures.

"And as for your books," said Turner, "the covers of some are certainly
very pretty."

Yet these men took a satisfaction in each other's society, such as
brothers might enjoy, but without either man appreciating the greatness
of the other.

Turner's temperament was audacious, self-centered, self-reliant, eager
for success and fame, yet at the same time scorning public opinion--a
paradox often found in the artistic mind of the first class; silent
always--with a bitter silence, disdaining to tell his meaning when the
critics could not perceive it.

He was above all things always the