Constable's father, however, had no sympathy for his son's budding genius. The boy, leaving school early, as we reckon now, was set to the task of watching a windmill, and here was one of the many ways in which God fulfilled Himself. Compelled to study the face of the sky with minutest care, the boy acquired that intimate familiarity with it, that joy "in gleaming showers, and breezy sunshine after rain, and grey mists of summer showers" (to quote Mr. H. W. Nevinson's words in an article he has most likely forgotten), which was the basis of his fame. Fuseli might sneer at the painter of "great-coat weather," but Fuseli had the reputation of a cynical wit to keep up. Englishmen will hail Constable for all time now as the faithful translator and revealer of the inner spirit of landscape. Still excuses may be made for the father. Parents have a pardonable habit of considering ways and means, of preferring the certain to the problematic, in planning careers for their sons. The apprehensions of Constable the elder were so far justified by results that Constable the younger was by no means immediately successful. He went to London in 1795, being then not twenty years of age. He came back, beaten, to the windmill and the counting house in 1797. From 1799 to 1816, married, struggling, unappreciated, he fought the desperate battle against poverty in London once more. Only in the latter year, when he was forty years of age, and his father died leaving him £4000, was he able to live in any approach to comfortable circumstances. Perhaps the deliverance from _res angusta domi_ helped him to paint better. Few men are so cheerfully constituted that, like Mr. Shandon in the Fleet and in _Pendennis_--in a novel, of course, but Mr. Shandon is a living reality--can produce good imaginative work amid squalid surroundings and domestic anxieties--perhaps he was really late in development. Certain it is that, except _A Lock on the Stour_ and _Dedham Vale_, few of Constable's better known pictures were painted before he was forty; and it is equally certain that, to the very end, he was never properly valued by his generation. For us he is the inspired revealer of the tranquil beauties of a district beloved and studied by him dearly and closely as the most ardent of Scots ever loved and studied Caledonia stern and wild, or the "banks and braes o' bonny Doon," and he has expressed his affection for his birthplace in words, not perhaps of fire, but of placid truth, which exactly express the character of the scenery. Of East Bergholt he writes: "The beauty of the surrounding scenery, its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadow flats sprinkled with flocks and herds, its well-cultivated uplands, its woods and rivers, with numerous scattered villages and churches, farms and picturesque cottages, all impart to this particular spot an amenity and elegance hardly anywhere else to be found." Reflecting thus we return to Manningtree and our peninsula.