drawing of Llanthony Abbey. It is in his
boyish manner, its date probably about 1795; evidently a sketch from
nature, finished at home. It had been a showery day; the hills were
partially concealed by the rain, and gleams of sunshine breaking out at
intervals. A man was fishing in the mountain stream. The young Turner
sought a place of some shelter under the bushes; made his sketch; took
great pains when he got home to imitate the rain, as he best could;
added his child's luxury of a rainbow; put in the very bush under which
he had taken shelter, and the fisherman, a somewhat ill-jointed and
long-legged fisherman, in the courtly short breeches which were the
fashion of the time.

215. Some thirty years afterwards, with all his powers in their
strongest training, and after the total change in his feelings and
principles, which I have endeavored to describe, he undertook the series
of "England and Wales," and in that series introduced the subject of
Llanthony Abbey. And behold, he went back to his boy's sketch and boy's
thought. He kept the very bushes in their places, but brought the
fisherman to the other side of the river, and put him, in somewhat less
courtly dress, under their shelter, instead of himself. And then he set
all his gained strength and new knowledge at work on the well-remembered
shower of rain, that had fallen thirty years before, to do it better.
The resultant drawing[39] is one of the very noblest of his second
period.

216. Another of the drawings of the England series, Ulleswater, is the
repetition of one in Mr. Fawkes's collection, which, by the method of
its execution, I should conjecture to have been executed about the year
1808 or 1810: at all events, it is a very quiet drawing of the first
period. The lake is quite calm; the western hills in gray shadow, the
eastern massed in light. Helvellyn rising like a mist between them, all
being mirrored in the calm water. Some thin and slightly evanescent cows
are standing in the shallow water in front; a boat floats motionless
about a hundred yards from the shore; the foreground is of broken rocks,
with some lovely pieces of copse on the right and left.

This was evidently Turner's record of a quiet evening by the shore of
Ulleswater, but it was a feeble one. He could not at that time render
the sunset colors: he went back to it, therefore, in the England series,
and painted it again with his new power. The same hills are there, the
same shadows, the