After Mr. Walter Fawkes’s death one of those wonders of the North, a goose-pie and presents of game were sent to Turner from Farnley regularly at Christmas time. The twenty-fifth pie was already packed when the news reached Farnley of the painter’s death. The three last letters Turner wrote to Mr. Fawkes acknowledging these annual presents have been preserved and published. In the one written on the 24th December, 1849, Turner finishes by saying: “I am sorry to say my health is much on the wane. I cannot bear the same fatigue, or have the same bearing against it, I formerly had--but time and tide stop not--but I must stop writing for to-day, and so I again beg to thank you for the Christmas present.” In the letter dated 17th December, 1850, the aged artist wrote: “Old Time has made sad work with me since I saw you in town. I always dread it with horror now. I feel it acutely now, whatever (it is)--gout or nervousness--it has fallen into my pedestals, and bid adieu to the marrow-bone stage.” These words, and indeed all the letter, are written in Turner’s curiously involved and confused style, but it was evident that the great painter’s career was nearly run. He died on the 9th December of the following year, and was buried eleven days later in the crypt of St. Paul’s beside Sir Joshua Reynolds, with all the magnificence due to his genius. * * * * * [Sidenote: THE FARNLEY HALL COLLECTION] It will be seen from the foregoing account of the personal relations between Mr. Walter Fawkes and Turner that the Farnley Hall Collection is mainly concerned with Turner’s work between the years 1804 and 1821. These works, therefore, belong to what Mr. Ruskin has described as Turner’s first period, when “he laboured as a student, imitating successively the works of the various masters who excelled in the qualities he desired to attain himself.” This classification of Mr. Ruskin’s is evidently made in the interests of Turner’s later work, the period Mr. Ruskin admired most. But the _parti-pris_ and insufficiency of a classification which dismisses the period during which the paintings and drawings of the Farnley Hall Collection were produced as one of mere imitation of the old masters are sufficiently exposed by a glance at the illustrations with which the present publication is enriched. To speak of the creator of the _The Passage of Mont Cenis_, _Scarborough_, _Otley from the Chevin_, and _The Valley of the Wharfe from Caley Park_ as a mere imitator seems to me quite absurd. My own view is that Turner’s period of imitation and apprenticeship had come to an end by the time he was thirty years of age (1805). By that time he was a complete master of every form of pictorial expression. The period between his thirtieth and forty-fifth years was the period of his freshest and happiest inspiration, as well as that of his soundest and most perfect workmanship. His oil paintings produced during these years