Perspective at the Academy, and delivered himself, it is said, of the most confused utterances on his subjects. His father had now to give up the barber's business and come to live with him, and he employed him in sawing, planing, and nailing together boards, which were painted yellow and used as frames for his pictures. The same miserly economy kept him from ever having a comfortable studio. He lived in a miserable lodging where he received nobody, had his meals at a restaurant of the most primitive order, carried his dinner wrapped up in paper when he went on excursions, and was exceedingly thankful if any one added to it a glass of wine. His diligence was fabulous. Every morning he rose on the stroke of six, locked his door, and worked with the same dreadful regularity day after day. His end was as unpoetic as his life. After being several times a father without ever having had a wife, he passed his last years with an old housekeeper, who kept him strictly under the yoke. If he was away from the house for long together he pretended that he was travelling to Venice for the sake of his work, until at last the honest housekeeper learnt, from a letter which he had put in his overcoat pocket and forgotten, that the object of all these journeys was not Venice at all, but Chelsea. There she found him in an attic which he had taken for another mistress, and where he was living under the name of Booth. In this little garret, almost more miserable than the room in the back street where he was born, the painter of light ended his days; and, to connect an atom of poetry with so sad a death, Ruskin adds that the window looked towards the sunset, and the dying eyes of the painter received the last rays of the sun which he had so often celebrated in glowing hymns. He left countless works behind him at his death, several thousands of pounds, and an immortal fame. This thought of glory after death occupied him from his youth. Only thus is it possible to understand why he led the life of a poor student until his end, why he did things which bordered on trickery in the sale of his _Liber Studiorum_, and kept for himself all those works by which he could have made a fortune. He left them--taken altogether, three hundred and sixty-two oil-paintings and nineteen thousand drawings--to the nation, and £20,000 to the Royal Academy, and merely stipulated that the two best pictures should be hung in the National Gallery between two Claude Lorrains. Another thousand pounds was set aside for the erection of a monument in St. Paul's. There, in that temple of fame, he lies buried near Sir Joshua Reynolds, the great ancestor of English painting, and he remains a phenomenon without forerunners and without descendants. [Illustration: CONSTABLE. WILLY LOTT'S HOUSE.] [Illustration: CONSTABLE. CHURCH PORCH, BERGHOLT.]