just acquired, and anticipating the
sunset glories and mountain gloom of the "Goldau" and "Dazio Grande,"
which the great artist was "realizing" for him from sketches he had
chosen at Queen Anne Street. He was very busy--but never too busy to see
his friends--writing a book. And, the visitor gone, he would run up to
his room and his writing.

In the afternoon his careful mother would turn him out for a tramp round
the Norwood lanes; he might look in at the Poussins and Claudes of the
Dulwich Gallery, or, for a longer excursion, go over to Mr. Windus, and
his roomful of Turner drawings, or sit to George Richmond for the
portrait at full length with desk and portfolio, and Mont Blanc in the
background. Dinner over, another hour or two's writing, and early to
bed, after finishing his chapter with a flourish of eloquence, to be
read next morning at breakfast to father and mother and Mary. The vivid
descriptions of scenes yet fresh in their memory, or of pictures they
treasured, the "thoughts" as they used to be called, allusions to
sincere beliefs and cherished hopes, never failed to win the praise that
pleased the young writer most, in happy tears of unrestrained emotion.
These old-fashioned folk had not learnt the trick of _nil admirari._
Quite honestly they would say, with the German musician, "When I hear
good music, then must I always weep."

We can look into the little study and see what this writing was that
went on so busily and steadily. It was the long-meditated defence of
Turner, provoked by _Blackwood's Magazine_ six years before, encouraged
by Carlyle's "Heroes," and necessitated by the silence, on this topic,
of the more enlightened leaders of thought in an age of connoisseurship
and cant.

And as the winter ran out, he was ending his work, happy in the applause
of his little domestic circle, and conscious that he was preaching the
crusade of Sincerity, the cause of justice for the greatest landscape
artist of any age, and justice, at the hands of a heedless public, for
the glorious works of the supreme Artist of the universe. Let our young
painters, he concluded, go humbly to Nature, "rejecting nothing,
selecting nothing, and scorning nothing," in spite of Academic
theorists, and in time we should have a school of landscape worthy of
the inspiration they would find.

There was his book; the title of it, "Turner and the Ancients." Before
publishing, to get more experienced criticism than that of the
brea