all current stories out of
the wounded sailors, do our best at present to show Nelson's funeral
streaming up the Thames; and vow that Trafalgar shall have its tribute
of memory some day. Which, accordingly, is accomplished--once, with
all our might, for its death; twice, with all our might, for its
victory; thrice, in pensive farewell to the old Temeraire, and, with
it, to that order of things.[123]

Now this fond companying with sailors must have divided his time, it
appears to me, pretty equally between Covent Garden and Wapping
(allowing for incidental excursions to Chelsea on one side, and
Greenwich on the other), which time he would spend pleasantly, but not
magnificently, being limited in pocket-money, and leading a kind of
"Poor-Jack" life on the river.

In some respects, no life could be better for a lad. But it was not
calculated to make his ear fine to the niceties of language, nor form
his moralities on an entirely regular standard. Picking up his first
scraps of vigorous English chiefly at Deptford and in the markets, and
his first ideas of female tenderness and beauty among nymphs of the
barge and the barrow,--another boy might, perhaps, have become what
people usually term "vulgar." But the original make and frame of
Turner's mind being not vulgar, but as nearly as possible a combination
of the minds of Keats and Dante, joining capricious waywardness, and
intense openness to every fine pleasure of sense, and hot defiance of
formal precedent, with a quite infinite tenderness, generosity, and
desire of justice and truth--this kind of mind did not become vulgar,
but very tolerant of vulgarity, even fond of it in some forms; and on
the outside, visibly infected by it, deeply enough; the curious result,
in its combination of elements, being to most people wholly
incomprehensible. It was as if a cable had been woven of blood-crimson
silk, and then tarred on the outside. People handled it, and the tar
came off on their hands; red gleams were seen through the black,
underneath, at the places where it had been strained. Was it
ochre?--said the world--or red lead?

Schooled thus in manners, literature, and general moral principles at
Chelsea and Wapping, we have finally to inquire concerning the most
important point of all. We have seen the principal differences between
this boy and Giorgione, as respects sight of the beautiful,
understanding of poverty, of commerce, and of order of battle; then
follows another