and transforms the whole ether into fine golden vapour; and vessels sail through the luminous haze. In reality one cannot venture on more than a swift glance into blinding masses of light, but the impression remained in the painter's memory. He painted what he saw, and knew how to make his effect convincing. And at the same time his composition became ever freer and easier, the work of his brush ever more fragrant and unfettered, the colouring and total sentiment of the picture ever more imaginative and like those of a fairy-tale. His world is a land of sun, where the reality of things vanishes, and the light shed between the eye and the objects of vision is the only thing that lives. At one time he took to painting human energy struggling with the phenomena of nature, as in "Storm at Sea," "Fire at Sea," and "Rain, Steam, and Speed"; at another he painted poetic revels of colour born altogether from the imagination, like the "Sun of Venice." He is the greatest creator in colour, the boldest poet amongst the landscape painters of all time! In him England's painting has put forth its greatest might, just as in Byron and Shelley, those two great powers, the English imagination unrolled its standard of war most proudly and brilliantly. There is only one Turner, and Ruskin is his prophet. [Illusration: _L'Art._ OLD CROME. A VIEW NEAR NORWICH.] [Illustration: _S. Low & Co._ JOHN CONSTABLE.] As a man, too, he was one of those original characters seldom met with nowadays. He was not the fastidious _gourmet_ that might have been expected from his pictures, but an awkward, prosaic, citizen-like being. He had a sturdy, thick-set figure, with broad shoulders and tough muscles, and was more like a captain in the merchant service than a disciple of Apollo. He was sparing to the point of miserliness, unformed by any kind of culture, ignorant even of the laws of orthography, silent and inaccessible. Like most of the great landscape painters of the century, he was city-bred. In a gloomy house standing back in a foggy little alley of Old London, in the immediate vicinity of dingy, monotonous lodging-houses, he was born, the son of a barber, on 23rd April 1775. His career was that of a model youth. At fifteen he exhibited in the Royal Academy; when he was eighteen, engravings were already being made after his drawings. At twenty he was known, and at twenty-seven he became a member of the Academy. His first earnings he gained by the neat and exact preparation of little views of English castles and country places--drawings which, at the time, took the place of photographs, and for which he received half a crown apiece and his supper. Thus he went over a great part of England, and upon one of his excursions he is said to have had a love-affair _à la_ Lucy of Lammermoor, and to have so taken it to heart that he resolved to remain a bachelor for the rest of his life. In 1808 he became Professor of