are as solidly and carefully worked as those of the old Flemish and Dutch masters. They are built to defy the centuries. A picture like the so-called _Pilot Boat_ (_Shoeburyness Fisherman hailing a Whitstable Hoy_)--painted more than a hundred years ago--is a model of perfect craftsmanship. It has no cracks, and Time has only mellowed the exquisite pearly harmonies of its colour and the indescribable charm of its wonderful surface. The _Trout Stream_, the _Spithead_, and _Frosty Morning_, have the same gift of immortality. It is only Turner’s later paintings which have cracked and faded and tarnished, and lost the “unthrifty loveliness” with which they were dowered when they were first exhibited. I may, I hope, be pardoned for preferring the classification of Turner’s “periods” adopted in my study of “Turner’s Sketches and Drawings” to Mr. Ruskin’s sweeping generalization. Turner’s Farnley work impinges on three of these periods--it begins with that of 1802 to 1809, when Turner was producing his own glorious sea-pieces; it covers the next period, from 1809 to 1813, when Turner was developing that deep and solemn conception of the poetry of rural life, which found expression in the _Frosty Morning_, _Abingdon_ and _Windsor_; and it runs half-way into the period of Turner’s greatest academical and popular success--that of 1813 to 1830. Of these three phases of Turner’s dazzling and complex genius I regard the middle one as the most important. The works produced in those years founded a genuinely national school of homely realism, and show Turner as the leader and inspirer of the Norwich School, and the master of David Cox, De Wint and all that is best in English water-colour painting. The spirit which animated this period is the spirit which informs nearly all the oil paintings and water-colours in the Farnley Hall Collection. At the death of Mr. Walter Fawkes, Turner’s works at Farnley Hall consisted of seven oil paintings and about two hundred water-colours. Since then the collection has been reduced to about two-thirds of its original size. Various drawings have been given as presents to different members of the family, and accidents of various kinds have happened to a few of the drawings. One of Mr. Walter Fawkes’s sons was given a couple of drawings to decorate his room at Eton. One of the drawings got dirtied and the boy put it in a basin of water to clean it, with disastrous results--a very expensive way of learning the difference between an oil painting and a water-colour. But the biggest gap in the collection was made by one of the present owner’s predecessors, the Rev. Ayscough Fawkes, who sent forty-nine water-colours and three oil paintings to Christie’s in June, 1890.