His pictures are familiar to many who have not seen all the originals, through David Lucas's mezzotints. The first series of twenty mezzotints was published in 1833 under the title, "Various Subjects of Landscape, characteristic of English Scenery, principally intended to display the Phenomena of the Chiar'oscuro of Nature." Constable devoted much attention to the enterprise during the remainder of his life, inspired to make it as fine as possible by the example of Claude's "Liber Veritatis" and Turner's "Liber Studiorum." But its "duration, its expense, its hopelessness of remuneration" oppressed him. "It harasses my days and disturbs my rest at nights" he wrote in 1831. Constable took things hardly, very hardly, after his wife's death in 1828. CHAPTER VI HIS PERSONALITY AND OPINIONS The personality of Constable was not romantic. In writing of him one has no moods of wonderment or bafflement, and the pen is not tempted to flights of wonder or fancy. The life of Turner might inspire a poem; but plain prose is the only vehicle for a consideration of the life of Constable. He was a sane, level-headed man compact of common-sense and practicality, a man of one great, embracive idea: that having studied the science of picture-making from the earlier masters, the landscape painter must learn from Nature and not from the derivative pictures of his contemporaries. Constable pursued that course with the single-heartedness of a man who devotes his life to some great commercial undertaking. Indeed the portraits of Constable might represent a prosperous and cultured banker, especially those of his later years, were it not for the full, observant eye that you feel surveys a wider domain than Lombard Street. Religious in the true sense, dutiful, humble before the mysteries of things; old-fashioned in the true sense, a lover and a quoter of good poetry and of the Bible, he had on occasion a sharp and shrewd tongue, but the sting was salved by the absolute sincerity of his intention. Leslie devotes considerable space to a record of Constable's opinions and sayings, many of which have been quoted in these pages. Of a certain contemporary he said--"More over-bearing meekness I never met with in any one man." Of his own pictures he said--"They will never be popular, for they have no handling. But I do not see any handling in Nature." Here is a saying about his art which sums up the whole tendency of his life--"Whatever may be thought of my art, it is my own; and I would rather possess a freehold, though but a cottage, than live in a palace belonging to another." And here is his comment on the unintelligent connoisseurship of his time--"The old rubbish of art, the musty, commonplace, wretched pictures which gentlemen collect, hang up, and display to their friends, may be compared to Shakespeare's-- 'Beggarly account of empty boxes, Alligators stuffed,' etc. Nature is anything but this, either in poetry, painting, or in the fields."