ill the interests of humanity ; its parapet was so low
that people have been known to fall over it. Once,
indeed, when a murder was committed, the supposed
murderer was able to persuade the jury that his victims—one of them was a woman—had fallen over in the heat of a struggle. The bridge is safer now, but its beauty is injured, and the little building on it, which looks like the spot where some anker of ancient days 'retired into notice,’ as Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Ponsonby were said by Wordsworth to have done, is gone too. It is a bridge of many stories. In the centre of it — a spot lying between the realm of England, in which the King ruled, and the Palatinate, in which the Prince Bishop of Durham was supreme, and being therefore a kind of no-man's-land — a clergyman used to celebrate marriages, which were held to be legal ; it was a Gretna Green, without the trouble of going so far. What would Turner say to Barnard Castle now .' — for we have not enumerated one-half of the evil things which have befallen it.
' Prudhoe ' is another of this series, and a drawing which, until now, has never left the guardianship of its happy owner. It is almost painful to look upon such a vision of calm and tender beauty, and know what Prudhoe itself has now become. The hill which is crowned by the ruined castle is much too steep in the drawing. Turner has made it like a Rhine castle, and has separated it by a gully from the main line of hills. Had it been as steep as he has made it, it would not now be defiled by a pit village, with all its ugly and sordid accompaniments, presented in perhaps a more openly degrading form than is customary. The pleasant footpaths up which Turner's feet strayed to the beautiful beech-wood and the ruin of the castle are now grimy, black cinder-paths, heavily trampled down by the almost equally black inhabitants of the village. Even that is not all, for within the mouldering walls of the castle itself is planted, and planted deliberately, the house of the Duke's agent. Prudhoe belongs to a Duke, and yet these things are ! Turner has not in the least caught the character of the place. We believe that when Mr. Kingsley, the owner, ventured to say so to him, he answered, 'The fault of that drawing is that there is far more of the Tweed in it than of the Tyne. I was only a day at Prudhoe, and my head was full of the Tweed, for I had just been spending a week at Miss Swinburne's, close by it.' To the right of the drawing is a glade — by the by, all the beauty of this glade is lost in the engraving — and some figures, which seem to point to a story, are sitting there. What is the story ? Some say that a woman has been having her fortune told by a gypsy, and is crying because it is a bad one. She has the appearance, however, of having worked out her own fortune, and badly. This ' Prudhoe ' drawing, fine though it is, really does not give the character of the place ; but, as a rule, accusations of this kind are unjust, for in some respects Turner was the most accurate painter who ever lived, fastening always with unerring precision on the higher and poetical truths. Milton's Garden of Eden is doubtless a very different place from that which a landscape-gardener would have set before us ; but which should we most care to have ?
' The Sea in Great Yarmouth ' — we are quoting from Modern Painters — 'should have been noticed for its expression of water under a fresh gale, seen in enormous extent from a great elevation. There is almost every form of sea in it: rolling waves dashing on the pier; successive breakers rolling to the shore ; a vast horizon of multitudinous waves ; and winding canals of calm water along the sands, bringing fragments of bright sky down into their yellow waves.' This is how Mr. Iluskin describes this drawing, and who could do it so well ? The sky is as fine as the sea ; altogether it is a beautiful drawing of a scene which in most people's hands would have been an ugl}' subject, but in Turner's is magnificent. It is wonderful, too, from the ease with which difficulties have been overcome. Every one knows what subtle drawing is required in a bird's-eye view from a height to give the flatness of such objects as canals, or watercourses, and satisfy the demands of the eye for illusive effect. We have been told that if a magnifying-glass be used, the figures at the base of Nelson's column can be seen. A storm is coming on, and, as if with Nelson's last words, 'Anchor, Hardy, anchor!' in his mind, Turner has painted all the ships in the bay riding at anchor, and on the wharf below is a large collection of anchors. By a frequent device of the artist, the blue of the sea is repeated on the cliff above by means of some blue and white garments blown out of a washerwoman's basket. It was nearly always washing-day when Turner went a-sketching. ' Stonehenge ' is a splendid drawing, though all the blue has faded from it ; it is a perfect marvel, too, of rapid execution: one deep wash of Prussian blue, and all the stones taken clean out with a knife, and then a little brown heaped on. But what composition, and what a sky! It is a sky which not only has had its fatal bolt for sheep and shepherd, but is still charged with electric fury, and has other bolts in store. Note the indescribable value of the distant monolith. ’Stamford,' with its plashy market-place, over which passengers, just disgorged from a great unwieldy stage-coach, are struggling to get away to the shelter of their homes with every variety of uncouth umbrella in their hands, is one of the ablest of the England and Wales drawings. The sky is full of dark clouds, from which rain is still falling, and lightning darting forth, though the worst of the storm is over and the sun beginning to shine again. The many church towers and spires gleam out in silvery brilliance in its watery rays. One of the spires is much out of the perpendicular, as artists' spires so often are. Another coach is just galloping in to escape the storm. This drawing, and 'Chatham,' with its endless repetition of objects that form St. Andrew's crosses, from soldiers' crossing shoulder-straps, and the wild way in which he has made them arrange their arms and legs, to the sails of a windmill.
