ago. The register of his birth was burned, and his age at
his death could only be arrived at by conjecture. He was the son of a
barber; and his father intended him, very properly, for his own
profession. The bent of the boy was, however, soon manifested, as is
always the case in children of extraordinary genius, too strongly to be
resisted; and a sketch of a coat of arms on a silver salver, made while
his father was shaving a customer, obtained for him, in reluctant
compliance with the admiring customer's advice, the permission to follow
art as a profession.

He had, of course, the usual difficulties of young artists to encounter,
and they were then far greater than they are now. But Turner differed
from most men in this,--that he was always willing to take anything to
do that came in his way. He did not shut himself up in a garret to
produce unsalable works of "high art," and starve, or lose his senses.
He hired himself out every evening to wash in skies in Indian ink, on
other people's drawings, as many as he could, at half-a-crown a-night,
getting his supper into the bargain. "What could I have done better?" he
said afterwards: "it was first-rate practice." Then he took to
illustrating guide-books and almanacs, and anything that wanted cheap
frontispieces. The Oxford Almanack, published on a single sheet, with a
copper-plate at the top of it, consisting of a "View"--you perhaps, some
of you, know the kind of print characteristic of the last century, under
which the word "View" is always printed in large letters, with a
dedication, obsequious to the very dust, to the Grand Signior of the
neighborhood. Well, this Almanack had always such a view of some Oxford
College at the top of it, dedicated, I think, always to the head of the
College; and it owed this, its principal decoration, to Turner for many
years. I have myself two careful drawings of some old seals, made by him
for a local book on the antiquities of Whalley Abbey. And there was
hardly a gentleman's seat of any importance in England, towards the
close of the last century, of which you will not find some rude
engraving in the local publications of the time, inscribed with the
simple name "W. Turner."

96. There was another great difference between Turner and other men. In
doing these drawings for the commonest publications of the day, and for
a remuneration altogether contemptible, he never did his work badly
because he thought it beneath him, or because he