The barber's position was plebeian, though there are no indications of its having been one of poverty. He came originally from Devonshire. Inquiry as to the descent of the artist's mother is balked by the widely differing stories that present themselves. From one account we learn that she was a native of Islington; from another that she came of a good Nottinghamshire family living at Shelford Manor-house, while yet we learn in another direction that her brother was a butcher at Brentford. We are involved in doubt at last as to whether, after all, her name was not _Mallord_ rather than Marshall, and hence the second Christian name of her son, which else there seems no way of accounting for. All this is obscure enough. Certainly, in the latter part of her life, the poor woman was insane and in confinement. Turner was uncommunicative upon most subjects; but in regard to his mother and her family he preserved a reticence of unusual severity. Mr. Ruskin has amused himself with a fanciful contrast between the boyhood of Giorgione at Venice, and of Turner in Covent Garden. There is no reason to believe that any disadvantage accrued to Turner from his somewhat uncheerful birthplace. It is hardly the Venetians who are the most alive to the beauties of Venice. But Mr. Ruskin is fond of mounting a richly-caparisoned charger of the imagination, and caracoling round a crotchety circus; and his feats in this respect are so elegantly and admirably fantastic, that we almost forbear to smile, out of deference to so perfect a non-perception of humour, when we find him tracing the painter back to _Covent Garden Market_ in all his paintings. Mr. Ruskin detects in the corners of Turner's foregrounds 'always a succulent cluster or two of green-grocery!' The artist's _Hesperides_ gleam with Covent Garden oranges; in his _Shipwrecks_ chests of them are flung upon the waters; and in his _St. Gothard_ a litter of stones reflects Covent Garden wreck after the market! What wonder Mr. Turner was tempted to exclaim now and then about his arch-critic--'He knows a great deal more about my pictures than I do. He puts things into my head, and points out meanings in them that I never intended.'