Then came the great Blind Painter, with his rude, iron pencils, to the help of Nature. He came with the Axe, Plough and Spade, her mightiest allies. With these he had driven wild Druidic Paganism back mile by mile from England's centre; back into her dark fastnesses. With the Axe, Spade and Plough he chased the foul beasts and barbarisms from the island. Two centuries long was he in painting this Beautiful Valley. Nature ground and mixed the colors for him all the while, for he was blind. He was poor; often cold and hungry, and his children, with blue fingers and pale, silent eyes, sometimes asked for bread in winter he could not 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.