he was a pupil of the above-named Edward Dayes, whose dislike, as in many similar cases, were roused by the rapid progress of his pupil to mastery and fame. When he was nineteen Girtin began to exhibit at the Royal Academy. At first his drawings were views in London (see illustration, p. 417); and included, wherever he could so contrive it, some fragment of picturesque and well-worn architecture. He next painted Scottish subjects; then scenes in Cumberland and Westmoreland, and views in York, Durham, Lichfield, Ely, Peterborough, Lincoln, Warwick, St. Albans, &c. Like so many of his fellow artists, he seized the opportunity offered by the Peace of Amiens to visit Paris, where he made a number of drawings which must be reckoned among his finest creations. Several of these were reproduced in aquatint. Just before setting out for France he had painted a panorama of London, some of the sketches for which are in the British Museum. They were done from the roof of the Albion flour-mills. Girtin was one of the famous company that frequented the house of Dr. Munro, on the Adelphi Terrace.

It was there, perhaps, that he formed his friendship, or at least acquaintance, with Turner, whose generous dictum as to Girtin's powers kept his fame alive when nothing of his own was accessible to do it for him. Girtin was probably a bit of a Morland in his habits. The reports to that effect are too numerous to be sét aside. But as in the case of many other painters who have been dubbed mauvais sujets, he did an amount of work that is inconsistent with the idea that dissipation was his main business. In his latter years, too, he appears to have been steadying down, and if time had been granted, it is likely enough that he would have developed into an irreproachable citizen.

Whether he would have grown into a great artist or not is another matter. Turner's opinion, that if Tom Girtin had lived, he himself would have starved, is, of course, worthy of much respect. But the characteristics of Girtin's drawings are not those which have, as a rule, distinguished the early work of men who have afterwards climbed to the summits of fame. They are too facile, too broad, too wanting in humility. They suggest a confident mind, a mind that might never have given itself time to get completely into sympathy with the material through which it found expression. Mr. Redgrave lays stress on Girtin's toleration of defects in the paper he used as a proof that his ideas on his art were not sound to the core, and there, it seems to me, he is right. The complete

artist has a complete love for the substance in which he works, and will never deliberately betray its shortcomings. But Girtin's drawings are creations in a sense that can be attached to no others of his time. They combine the unity of Cozens with a grip on truth that was far wider than his, while they display an originality of outlook which had been previously unknown among those who painted in water.

Setting aside, moreover, what Girtin might have been, his works show that he had a fine eye for line, for colour, and for the significance of facture, added to that rare independence which enables nature to make its impression on the brain unaffected by the guarding hedge of precept and tradition. The fine collection of his work which now belongs to the nation is enough by itself to show that at the time of his death he had contrived to deliver himself with a copiousness as yet unapproached by Turner, and to account for the sense of inferiority confessed by the latter. His "sword play," as the elder Lewis called it, the vigorous sweep, the decisive start and stop, of his brush, must have been especially dazzling to Turner, who was never, in his whole triumphant career, to reach anything at all like it. Short as his twenty-seven years of life were, Girtin had time to become almost famous. His drawings made a noise, and were imitated. People even whispered that forgeries were made after them by a man so able to work for himself as Françia, and caricatures of his style were set as models by half the drawing masters in the country. It was in connection with some of these imitations that Dayes made the mot which, for a time, brought that distrust upon the style, which a word of clever abuse so often does. Shown a portfolio of drawings from the Cumberland hills by one of Girtin's closest followers, "Oh, ye gods! the blue bag, the blue bag!" exclaimed Dayes, and the exclamation so exactly fitted the style, that it crushed it, and re-echoed upon Girtin himself. Francis Louis Thomas Francia, whom I have just named, was a Frenchman by birth, a native of Calais. He came when a boy to England, and lived here some eight-and-twenty or thirty years. His drawings are remarkable for breadth, and only want, as a rule, some better pictorial idea to put them very high in the school to which they belong. As it is, they often show too violent a contrast between effect and theme.

And now to put the cope-stone on the structure whose growth has been roughly sketched in the foregoing pages. From the

days when Holbein limned the courtiers of Henry VIII. down to the end of the eighteenth century, events had been preparing the way for that English water-colour school which was at last to receive its crowning ornament. The services of Turner to the art in which he excelled have been discussed so often that it is a little difficult to speak of them now. Within the last quarter of a century a regular cult has sprung up about his name, which will lead at last to every stroke of his brush having its record. One good result of so much publicity has been

a short summary of how he enriched the methods of the aquarellist, and wrote finis to the development of three centuries.

Among painters in water-colour Girtin had been the first to treat it as the equal of oil. He had been the first to see that its powers of grappling directly with natural appearances were no less than those of the robuster medium. More especially did he lead the way in giving the true local colour to every object he put into his pictures. He painted hills, buildings, and foregrounds in their real tints, trusting to his eye for harmony rather than to neutral

the general consent to see his best work in his drawings and in the Liber Studiorum. With the latter we have at present no business, beyond pointing out that in one or two of the plates the indifference to unity which chiefly distinguishes the conceptions of Turner from those of Girtin is to be traced. As an instance, I may name the Esacus and Hesperie, which, though lovely in its drawing of tree forms, and intricately delightful in its chiaroscuro, is without the concentration of the highest art. As for the master's drawings in water, I must be content to give

washes and other lowering agents. But even Girtin was scarcely a colourist. It was reserved for Turner to follow a hue through all degrees of light; and to paint shadows and objects in shade in their right colour. In this respect his practice was like that of Rubens. He never forced a shadow into gloom to enhance a light; he rather allowed the latter to lose some of the brilliance that contrast would have given it, for the sake of preserving colour. When he had once fully abandoned the timid, hinting, manner of his youth, Turner's method seems to have been to lay the

blotting portions of the tint, or sharpening the edges of lights and giving forms of foliage, buildings, or figures, by taking out lights with bread, or damp rag. Again by wetting dark masses of tint, and when in a wet state by scraping out lights with a bluntish knife; cutting out sharp lights from the surface of the paper, to give broad, high lights or white drapery, buildings, or animals, or the glittering and sunlighted edges of leaves; stippling to flatten and give breadth to skies and distances; or to neutralise and harmonise colour by the introduction of other tints." In the just use of these expedients Turner was unrivalled. In his more elaborate works they are all combined on a single sheet of paper,

and are all alike invisible to anything but the eye which looks into the texture to trace them out. As to the artistic value of the results he won, opinions will, I fear, continue to be at variance so long as his pictures last. To those who believe that he who gives the strongest hint at the beauties of the world is the greatest painter, Turner's drawings will ever stand upon a pinnacle of their own; while to that much smaller but perhaps more seeing circle to whom a work of art must be a creation, with the organised unity of a living thing, his pictures in colour, splendid in colour as they are, will never be quite satisfactory. WALTER ARMSTRONG.

CHARLES SAYLE.

A PECULIAR flavour of the Regency lingers about the record of the Brighton Road. It is a record, as I read it, of Bucks, with stupendous stocks, and hats with brims. weirdly curly, casting deathly glances at lone maidens perambulating haplessly by the way side; a record of "The Fancy," as I see it drawn for me in the classic pages of Boxiana-thronging in their thousands, and in almost as many different kinds of conveyances to witness one of the many great battles decided on Crawley Down or Blindley Heath; a record finally of the great George himself, repairing to the health resort which his royal penetration had discovered, and repairing there in a coach and four, driven by his own royal hands, at the rate of fiftysix round miles in four hours and a half.

Indeed it seems to me that the Brighton Road might almost be called the Regent's Road. For where without the Regent would its terminus have been? Why it would have been nowhere; or it might have been at St. Leonards, Eastbourne, or anywhere else. When once however the Regent had discovered that the air of Brighton tended to benefit his health, he made a centre of fashion out of a small health-resort, almost before he had time to finish the Pavilion ; and one of the finest of the coaching roads of England out of an uncertain track, often impassable.

For before the Pavilion was, Brighton was about as easy to get at as Cranmere Pool in the middle of Dartmoor, the moon, the North Pole, the special exits in case of fire