"'The Font' is an allegory of all creeds and all created things coming together into the light of truth. The Queen is the owner of 'The Font.' She wrote to her old friend and expressed her admiration for it, and asked to become the possessor. Her help and sympathy brightened the sadness of those last days for him. It is well known that he appealed to her once, when haunted by some painful apprehensions, and that her wise and judicious kindness came to the help of his nurses. She sent him back a message, bade him not be afraid, and to trust to those who were doing their best for him, and in whom she herself had every confidence.... "He wished to die in his studio, his dear studio, for which he used to long when he was away, and where he lay so long expecting the end; but it was in his own room that he slept away. His brother was with him. His old friend came into the room. He knew him and pressed his hand." Landseer died on the morning of October 1, 1873, and was buried October 11, with distinguished honors, in St. Paul's Cathedral. TURNER. "Turner was unquestionably, in his best time, the greatest master of water color who had ever lived. He may have been excelled since then in some special departments of the art, in some craft of execution, or in the knowledge of some particular thing in nature; but no one has ever deserved such generally high rank as Turner in the art of water-color painting. His superiority even goes so far that the art, in his hands, is like another art, a fresh discovery of his own. [Illustration: TURNER.] "The color, in his most delicate work, hardly seems to be laid on the paper by any means known to us, but suggests the idea of a vaporous deposit, and besides the indescribable excellence of those parts of Turner's water-colors which do not look as if they were painted at all, there is excellence of another kind in those parts which exhibit dexterities of execution. Nor is the strange perfection of his painting in water color limited to landscape; his studies of still life, birds and their plumage, bits of interiors at Petworth, etc., are evidence enough that, had he chosen to paint objects rather than effects, he might have been as wonderful an object painter as William Hunt was, though in a different and more elevated manner." Thus writes Philip Gilbert Hamerton. Turner was born April 23, 1775, in Maiden Lane, London, over a barber shop, in which his father, William Turner, lived and worked. The latter was an economical, good-natured, uneducated man, who taught his boy to be honest and saving. The mother, Mary Turner, belonged to a family of Marshalls or Mallords near Nottingham, superior in position to the family of William Turner. She had an ungovernable temper, and is said to have led the barber "a sad life." Later, she became insane, and was sent to an asylum.