give. He
lived in a low cottage, small, damp and dark, and laid him down at
night upon a bed of straw. He could not read; and his thoughts of
human life and its hereafter were few and small. He had no taste
for music, and seldom whistled at his work. He wore a coarse
garment, of ghostly pattern, called a smock-frock. His hat just
rounded his head to a more globular and mindless form. His shoes
were as heavy as a horse's with iron nails. He had no eye nor taste
for colors. If all the trees, if all the crops of grain, grass and
roots on which he wrought his life long, had come out in brickdust
and oil, it would have been all the same to him, if they had sold as
high in the market, and beer and bread had been as cheap for the
uniformity. And yet he was the Turner of this great painting. He
is the artist that has made England a gallery of the finest
agricultural pictures in the world. And in no country in
Christendom is High Art so appreciated to such pecuniary patronage
and valuation as here. In none is the genius of the Pencil so
treasured, so paid, and almost worshipped as here. The public and
private galleries of Britain hold pictures that would buy every acre
of the island at the price current of it when Elizabeth was queen.
One of Turner's landscapes would pay for a whole Highland county at
its valuation when Mary held her first court at Holyrood.

I sit here and look off upon this largest, loveliest picture the
Blind Painter has given to England. I note his grouping of the ivy-
framed fields, of every size and form, panelling the gently-rounded
hills, and all the soft slopes down to the foot of the valley; the
silvery, ripe barley against the dark-green beans; the rich gold of
the wheat against the smooth, blue-dashed leaves of the mangel
wurzel or rutabaga; the ripening oats overlooking a foreground of
vividly green turnips, with alternations of pasture and meadow land,
hedges running in every direction, plantations, groves, copses
sprinkled over the whole vista, as if the whole little world, clear
up to the soft, blue fringe of the horizon, were the design and work
of a single artist. And this, and ten thousand pictures of the same
genius, were the work of the Briarean-handed BLIND PAINTER, who
still wears a smock-frock and hob-nailed shoes, and lives in a low,
damp cottage, and dines on bread and cheese among the golden sheaves
of harvest!

O, Mother England! thou that knightest the artists whil