the whole business of the human race on earth was to know
what o'clock it was, and when it would be high water,--only some slight
weakness in favor of grog being indicated here and there by a
hospitable-looking open door, a gay bow-window, and a sign intimating
that it is a sailor's duty to be not only accurate, but "jolly."

Turner was always fond of this neat, courageous, benevolent, merry,
methodical Deal. He painted it very early, in the Southern Coast series,
insisting on one of the tavern windows as the principal subject, with a
flash of forked lightning streaming beyond it out at sea like a narrow
flag. He has the same association in his mind in the present plate;
disorder and distress among the ships on the left, with the boat going
out to help them; and the precision of the little town stretching in
sunshine along the beach.

XII.--SCARBOROUGH.

[Illustration: SCARBOROUGH.]

I have put this plate last in the series, thinking that the reader will
be glad to rest in its morning quietness, after so much tossing among
the troubled foam. I said in the course of the introduction, that
nothing is so perfectly calm as Turner's calmness; and I know very few
better examples of this calmness than the plate before us, uniting, as
it does, the glittering of the morning clouds, and trembling of the sea,
with an infinitude of peace in both. There are one or two points of
interest in the artifices by which the intense effect of calm is
produced. Much is owing, in the first place, to the amount of absolute
gloom obtained by the local blackness of the boats on the beach; like a
piece of the midnight left unbroken by the dawn. But more is owing to
the treatment of the distant harbor mouth. In general, throughout
nature, Reflection and Repetition are _peaceful_ things; that is to say,
the image of any object, seen in calm water, gives us an impression of
quietness, not merely because we know the water must be quiet in order
to be reflective; but because the fact of the repetition of this form is
lulling to us in its monotony, and associated more or less with an idea
of quiet succession, or reproduction, in events or things throughout
nature:--that one day should be like another day, one town the image of
another town, or one history the repetition of another history, being
more or less results of quietness, while dissimilarity and
non-succession are also, more or less, results of interference and
disquietude. And thus