In 1826 he commenced what was to have been his _magnum opus_ in line engraving--his “Picturesque Views in England and Wales.” In this ill-fated work, which was from first to last commercially a failure, he proposed to depict every feature of English and Welsh scenery--cathedral cities, country towns, ancient castles, ruined abbeys, rivers, mountains, moors, lakes and sea-coast; every hour of day--dawn, midday, sunset, twilight, moonlight; every kind of weather and atmosphere. The hundred or more drawings which he made for the work are mostly elaborately finished and of high character. Some are perhaps over-elaborated; in some the figures are carelessly and at times disagreeably drawn; but for imaginative, poetical treatment, masterly composition, and exquisite colour, the best are unsurpassed. I have ventured to say elsewhere, that in my opinion there are at least a dozen drawings in the “England and Wales” series any one of which would alone have been sufficient to have placed its author in the highest rank of landscape art. Two of the series are represented here--Mr. Schwann’s beautiful _Launceston_ (Plate XV.) is the earlier (1827); the striking and very attractive _Cowes_ (Plate XVIII.), belonging to Mr. Yates, is a few years later. Turner was paid at the rate of sixty to seventy guineas apiece--to-day they are worth from one thousand to two thousand five hundred guineas each. A new phase in his water-colour art of 1830-1836 calls for notice, viz., his numerous small drawings for _vignette_ illustrations, the first and the most important of which were for the far-famed plates of Rogers’s “Poems” and “Italy.” The drawings for these are markedly different from any of his previous work, and many of them strike what I cannot but regard as an unpleasant note. Marvels of execution, delicate, highly imaginative, and poetical in feeling as they are, they are often strangely forced and extravagant in _colour_. And this applies to nearly all his drawings for _vignettes_. Probably his reason for thus falsifying his colour was connected with the form of engraving, as at the same time he was producing some of his finest and sanest work for the “England and Wales,” “Turner’s Annual Tours” (now better known as the “Rivers of France”) and other engravings of ordinary (not vignette) shape. Whatever may have been his motive, it appears to me that owing to this unnatural colouring, the exquisitely engraved vignettes themselves are in many cases finer than the drawings for them.