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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 in 2019 with funding from 
 Getty Research Institute 
 
 https://archive.org/details/harboursofenglanOOIupt 
 
HARBOURS OF ENGLAND. 
 
London: 
 
 Printed by Spottiswoode & Co. 
 New-street-Square. 
 
THE 
 
 HARBOURS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 ENGRAVED BY THOMAS LUPTON, 
 
 FROM ORIGINAL DRAWINGS MADE EXPRESSLY FOR THE WORK BY 
 
 J. M. W. TURNER, R.A. 
 
 WITH 
 
 ILLUSTRATIVE TEXT 
 
 BY 
 
 J. RUSKIN, 
 
 AUTHOR OF “MODERN PAINTERS.” 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 PUBLISHED BY 
 
 E. GAMBART AND CO., 25. BERNERS STREET, OXFORD STREET. 
 
 1856. 
 

 
 PREFACE. 
 
 Among the many peculiarities which distinguished the late J. M. W. 
 Turner from other landscape painters, not the least notable, in my appre¬ 
 hension, were his earnest desire to arrange his works in connected groups, 
 and his evident intention, with respect to each drawing, that it should he 
 considered as expressing part of a continuous system of thought. The 
 practical result of this feeling was that he commenced many series of 
 drawings, — and, if any accident interfered with the continuation of the 
 work, hastily concluded them, — under titles representing rather the re¬ 
 lation which the executed designs bore to the materials accumulated in 
 his own mind, than the position which they could justifiably claim when 
 contemplated by others. The “River Scenery” was closed without a 
 single drawing of a rapidly running stream; and the prints of his annual 
 tours w r ere assembled, under the title of the “Rivers of Trance,” without 
 including a single illustration either of the Rhone or the Garonne. 
 
 The title under which the following plates are now presented to the 
 public, is retained merely out of respect to this habit of Turner’s. Under 
 that title he commenced the publication, and executed the vignette for its 
 
 A 2 
 
IV 
 
 PKEEACE. 
 
 titlepage, intending doubtless to make it worthy of taking rank with, if 
 not far above, the consistent and extensive series of the “ Southern Coast,” 
 executed in his earlier years. But procrastination and accident equally 
 interfered with his purpose. The excellent engraver Mr. Lupton, in co¬ 
 operation with whom the work was undertaken, was unfortunately also 
 a man of genius, and seems to have been just as capricious as Turner 
 himself in the application of his powers to the matter in hand. Had 
 one of the parties in the arrangement been a mere plodding man of 
 business, the work would have proceeded; but between the two men of 
 talent it came very naturally to a stand. They petted each other by 
 reciprocal indulgence of delay; and at Turner’s death, the series, so 
 magnificently announced under the title of the “ Harbours of England,” 
 consisted only of twelve plates, all the less worthy of their high-sounding 
 title in that, while they included illustrations of some of the least im¬ 
 portant of the watering-places, they did not include any illustration 
 whatever of such harbours of England as Liverpool, Shields, Yarmouth, 
 or Bristol. Such as they were, however, I was requested to undertake 
 their illustration. As the offer was made at a moment when much 
 nonsense, in various forms, was being written about Turner and his 
 works; and among the twelve plates there were four* which I con¬ 
 sidered among the very finest that had been executed from his marine 
 subjects, I accepted the trust; partly to prevent the really valuable series 
 of engravings from being treated with injustice, and partly because there 
 were several features in them by which I could render more intelligible 
 some remarks I wished to make on Turner’s marine painting in general. 
 
 * Portsmouth, Sheerness, Scarborough, and Whitby. 
 
PEEFACE. 
 
 v 
 
 These remarks, therefore, I have thrown together, in a connected 
 form; less with a view to the illustration of these particular plates, 
 than of the general system of ship-painting which was characteristic of 
 the great artist. I have afterwards separately noted the points which 
 seemed to me most deserving of attention in the plates themselves. 
 
 Of archaeological information the reader will find none. The designs 
 themselves are, in most instances, little more than spirited sea-pieces, with 
 such indistinct suggestion of local features in the distance as may justify 
 the name given to the subject; hut even when, as in the case of the 
 Dover and Portsmouth, there is something approaching topographical 
 detail, I have not considered it necessary to lead the reader into inquiries 
 which certainly Turner himself never thought of; nor do I suppose it 
 would materially add to the interest of these cloudy distances or rolling 
 seas, if I had the time—which I have not—to collect the most complete 
 information respecting the raising of Prospect Rows, and the establishment 
 of circulating libraries. 
 
 Denmark Hill, April, 1856. 
 

 
Vll 
 
 LIST OF PLATES. 
 
 Plate I. 
 
 DOVER 
 
 - 
 
 - 
 
 to face page 
 
 II. 
 
 RAMSGATE 
 
 - 
 
 - 
 
 33 
 
 III. 
 
 PLYMOUTH 
 
 - 
 
 - 
 
 99 
 
 IV. 
 
 CATWATER 
 
 - 
 
 - 
 
 3 3 
 
 V. 
 
 SHEERNESS 
 
 - 
 
 - 
 
 95 
 
 VI. 
 
 MARGATE 
 
 - 
 
 - 
 
 93 
 
 VII. 
 
 PORTSMOUTH 
 
 - 
 
 - 
 
 99 
 
 VIII. 
 
 FALMOUTH 
 
 - 
 
 - 
 
 99 
 
 IX. 
 
 SIDMOUTH 
 
 - 
 
 - 
 
 39 
 
 X. 
 
 WHITBY 
 
 - 
 
 - 
 
 99 
 
 XI. 
 
 DEAL 
 
 - 
 
 - 
 
 55 
 
 XII. 
 
 SCARBOROUGH 
 
 
 
 9 5 
 
 29 
 
 31 
 
 33 
 
 35 
 
 37 
 
 39 
 
 41 
 
 43 
 
 45 
 
 47 
 
 49 
 
 51 
 
THE 
 
 HARBOURS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 Oe all things, living or lifeless, upon this strange earth, there is but one 
 which, having reached the mid-term of appointed human endurance on 
 it, I still regard with unmitigated amazement. I know, indeed, that all 
 around me is wonderful—but I cannot answer it with wonder:—a dark 
 veil, with the foolish words, nature of things, upon it, casts its deadening 
 folds between me and their dazzling strangeness. Mowers open, and stars 
 rise, and it seems to me they could have done no less. The mystery of 
 distant mountain-blue only makes me reflect that the earth is of necessity 
 mountainous;—the sea-wave breaks at my feet, and I do not see how it 
 should have remained unbroken. But one object there is still, which I never 
 pass without the renewed wonder of childhood, and that is the bow of a 
 Boat. Not of a racing-wherry, or revenue cutter, or clipper yacht; but 
 the blunt head of a common, bluff, undecked sea-boat, lying aside in its 
 furrow of beach sand. The sum of Navigation is in that. You may magnify 
 it or decorate as you will: you do not add to the wonder of it. Lengthen 
 it into hatchet-like edge of iron,—strengthen it with complex tracery of 
 ribs of oak,—carve it and gild it till a column of light moves beneath it 
 on the sea,—you have made no more of it than it was at first. That rude 
 simplicity of bent plank, that can breast its way through the death that is 
 in the deep sea, has in it the soul of shipping. Beyond this, we may have 
 more work, more men, more money; we cannot have more miracle. 
 
 Bor there is, first, an infinite strangeness in the perfection of the thing, 
 as work of human hands. I know nothing else that man does, which is 
 perfect, but that. All Ms other doings have some sign of weakness, affec¬ 
 tation, or ignorance in them. They are overfinished or underfinished; they 
 
 B 
 
2 
 
 THE HARBOURS OE ENGLAND. 
 
 do not quite answer tlieir end, or they show a mean vanity in answering it 
 too well. 
 
 But the boat’s how is naively perfect: complete without an effort. The 
 man who made it knew not he was making anything beautiful, as he bent 
 its planks into those mysterious, ever-changing curves. It grows under 
 his hand into the image of a sea-shell; the seal, as it were, of the flowing 
 of the great tides and streams of ocean stamped on its delicate rounding, 
 lie leaves it when all is done, without a boast. It is simple work, hut it 
 will keep out water. And every plank thenceforward is a Bate, and has 
 men’s lives wreathed in the knots of it, as the cloth-yard shaft had their 
 deaths in its plumes. 
 
 Then, also, it is wonderful on account of the greatness of the thing 
 accomplished. No other work of human hands ever gained so much. 
 Steam-engines and telegraphs indeed help us to fetch, and carry, and talk ; 
 they lift weights for us, and bring messages, with less trouble than would 
 have been needed otherwise; this saving of trouble, however, does not 
 constitute a new faculty, it only enhances the powers we already possess. 
 But in that how of the boat is the gift of another world. Without it, 
 what prison wall would he so strong as that “white and wailing fringe” 
 of sea. What maimed creatures were we all, chained to our rocks, An¬ 
 dromeda-like, or wandering by the endless shores, wasting our incom¬ 
 municable strength, and pining in hopeless watch of unconquerable 
 waves ? The nails that fasten together the planks of the boat’s how 
 are the rivets of the fellowship of the world. Their iron does more 
 than draw lightning out of heaven, it leads love round the earth. 
 
 Then also, it is wonderful on account of the greatness of the enemy 
 that it does battle with. To lift dead weight; to overcome length of languid 
 space; to multiply or systematize a given force; this we may see done 
 by the bar, or beam, or wheel, without wonder. But to war with that 
 living fury of waters, to hare its breast, moment after moment, against 
 the unwearied enmity of ocean,—the subtle, fitful, implacable smiting of 
 the black waves, provoking each other on, endlessly, all the infinite march 
 of the Atlantic rolling on behind them to their help,—and still to strike 
 them hack into a wreath of smoke and futile foam, and win its way against 
 them, and keep its charge of life from them; — does any other soulless 
 thing do as much as this ? 
 
 I should not have talked of this feeling of mice about a boat, if I had 
 thought it was mine only; but I believe it to be common to all of us 
 
THE IIAEB0T7ES OE ENGLAND. 
 
 3 
 
 who are not seamen. With the seaman, wonder changes into fellowship 
 and close affection; hut to all landsmen, from youth upwards, the boat 
 remains a piece of enchantment; at least unless we entangle our vanity in 
 it, and refine it away into mere lath, giving up all its protective nobleness 
 for pace. With those in whose eyes the perfection of a boat is swift 
 fragility, I have no sympathy. The glory of a boat is, first its steadiness of 
 poise—its assured standing on the clear softness of the abyss; and, after 
 that, so much capacity of progress by oar or sail as shall be consistent with 
 this defiance of the treachery of the sea. And, this being understood, it is 
 very notable how commonly the poets, creating for themselves an ideal of 
 motion, fasten upon the charm of a boat. They do not usually express any 
 desire for wings, or, if they do, it is only in some vague and half-unintended 
 phrase, such as “flit or soar,” involving wingedness. Seriously, they 
 are evidently content to let the wings belong to Horse, or Muse, or Angel, 
 rather than to themselves; hut they all, somehow or other, express an 
 honest wish for a Spiritual Boat. I will not dwell on poor Shelley’s paper 
 navies, and seas of quicksilver, lest we should begin to think evil of boats in 
 general because of that traitorous one in Spezzia Bay; hut it is a triumph 
 to find the pastorally minded Wordsworth imagine no other way of visiting 
 the stars than in a boat “ no bigger than the crescent moon ” *; and to find 
 Tennyson—although his boating, in an ordinary way, has a very marshy 
 and punt-like character—at last, in his highest inspiration, enter in where 
 the wind began “ to sweep a music out of sheet and shroud.” t But the 
 chief triumph of all is in Dante. He had known all manner of travelling; 
 had been borne through vacancy on the shoulders of chimeras, and lifted 
 through upper heaven in the grasp of its spirits; hut yet I do not remember 
 that he ever expresses any positive wish on such matters, except for a 
 boat. 
 
 “ Guido, I wish that Lapo, thou, and I, 
 
 Led by some strong enchantment, might ascend 
 A magic ship, whose charmed sails should fly 
 With winds at will where’er our thoughts might wend, 
 So that no change nor any evil chance 
 
 Should mar our joyous voyage ; but it might be 
 That even satiety should still enhance 
 Between our souls their strict community: 
 
 * Prologue to Peter Bell. 
 
 f In Memoriam, ci. 
 
4 
 
 THE HARBOURS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 And that the bounteous wizard then would place 
 Yanna and Bice, and our Lapo’s love, 
 
 Companions of our wandering, and would grace 
 With passionate talk, wherever we might rove. 
 
 Our time, and each were as content and free 
 As I believe that thou and I should be.” 
 
 And of all tlie descriptions of motion in the “ Divina Commedia,” I do not 
 think there is another quite so fine as that in which Dante has glorified the 
 old fable of Charon by giving a boat also to the bright sea which surrounds 
 the mountain of Purgatory, bearing the redeemed souls to their place of 
 trial; only an angel is now the pilot, and there is no stroke of labouring 
 oar, for his wings are the sails. 
 
 “ My preceptor silent yet 
 Stood, while the brightness that we first discerned 
 Opened the form of wings: then, when he knew 
 The pilot, cried aloud, 1 Down, down ; bend low 
 Thy knees ; behold God’s angel: fold thy hands : 
 
 Now shalt thou see true ministers indeed. 
 
 Lo! how all human means he sets at nought; 
 
 So that nor oar he needs, nor other sail 
 Except his wings, between such distant shores. 
 
 Lo! how straight up to heaven he holds them reared, 
 
 Winnowing the air with those eternal plumes, 
 
 That not like mortal hairs fall off or change.’ 
 
 “ As more and more toward us came, more bright 
 Appeared the bird of God, nor could the eye 
 Endure his splendour near: I mine bent down. 
 
 He drove ashore in a small bark so swift 
 And light, that in its course no wave it drank. 
 
 The heavenly steersman at the prow was seen, 
 
 Yisibly written blessed in his looks. 
 
 Within, a hundred spirits and more there sat.” 
 
 I have given this passage at length, because it seems to me that Dante’s 
 most inventive adaptation of the fable of Charon to Heaven has not been 
 regarded with the interest that it really deserves ; and because, also, it is a 
 description that should be remembered by every traveller when first he sees 
 the white fork of the felucca sail shining on the Southern Sea. Not that 
 Dante had ever seen such sails *; his thought was utterly irrespective of the 
 
 * I am not quite sure of this, not having studied with any care the forms of medieval 
 shipping; but in all the MSS. I have examined the sails of the shipping represented are 
 square. 
 
THE HARBOURS OE ENGLAND. 
 
 form of canvass in any ship of the period; hut it is well to he able to attach 
 this happy image to those felucca sails, as they now float white and soft 
 above the blue glowing of the bays of Adria. Nor are other images wanting 
 in them. Seen far away on the horizon, the Neapolitan felucca has all the 
 aspect of some strange bird stooping out of the air and just striking the 
 water with its claws; while the Venetian, when its painted sails are at full 
 swell in sunshine, is as beautiful as a butterfly with its wings half-closed. * 
 There is something also in them that might remind us of the variegated 
 and spotted angel wings of Orcagna, only the Venetian sail never looks 
 majestic; it is too quaint and strange, yet with no peacock’s pride or vulgar 
 gaiety,—nothing of Milton’s Dalilali: 
 
 “ So bedecked, ornate and gay 
 Like a stately skip 
 Of Tarsus, bound for tbe Isles 
 Of Javan or Gadire 
 
 With all ber bravery on and tackle trim, 
 Sails filled and streamers waving.” 
 
 That description could only have been written in a time of vulgar women 
 and vulgar vessels. The utmost vanity of dress in a woman of the four¬ 
 teenth century would have given no image of “ sails filled or streamers 
 waving”; nor does the look or action of a really “ stately ” ship ever suggest 
 any image of the motion of a weak or vain woman. The beauties of the 
 Court of Charles II., and the gilded galleys of the Thames, might fitly he 
 compared; but the pomp of the Venetian fisher-boat is like neither. The 
 sail seems dyed in its fulness by the sunshine, as the rainbow dyes a cloud; 
 the rich stains upon it fade and reappear, as its folds swell or fall; worn 
 with the Adrian storms, its rough woof has a kind of noble dimness upon 
 it, and its colours seem as grave, inherent, and free from vanity as the 
 spots of the leopard, or veins of the seasliell. 
 
 Yet, in speaking of poets’ love of boats, I ought to have limited the 
 love to modern poets; Dante, in this respect, as in nearly every other, 
 being far in advance of his age. It is not often that I congratulate 
 myself upon the days in which I happen to live; but I do so in this 
 
 * It is not a little strange that in all tbe innumerable paintings of Venice, old and 
 modern, no notice whatever bad been taken of these sails, though they are exactly tbe most 
 striking feature of tbe marine scenery around tbe city, until Turner fastened upon them, 
 painting one important picture, tbe Sun of Venice, entirely in their illustration. 
 
6 
 
 THE HARBOURS OE ENGLAND. 
 
 respect, that, compared with every other period of the world, this nine¬ 
 teenth century (or rather, the period between 1750 and 1850) may not 
 improperly he called the Age of Boats; while the classic and chivalric 
 times, in which boats were partly dreaded, partly despised, may respectively 
 he characterized, with regard to their means of locomotion, as the Age of 
 Chariots, and the Age of Horses. 
 
 Bor, whatever perfection and costliness there may be in the present 
 decorations, harnessing, and horsing of any English or Parisian wheel 
 equipage, I apprehend that we can from none of them form any high ideal 
 of wheel conveyance; and that unless we had seen an Egyptian king bending 
 his how with his horses at the gallop, or a Greek knight leaning with his 
 poised lance over the shoulder of his charioteer, we have no right to consider 
 ourselves as thoroughly knowing what the word “ chariot,” in its noblest 
 acceptation, means. 
 
 So, also, though much chivalry is yet left in us, and we English still 
 know several things about horses, I believe that if we had seen Charlemagne 
 and Boland ride out hunting from Aix, or Cceur de Lion trot into camp 
 on a sunny evening at Ascalon, or a Elorentine lady canter down the 
 Yal d’ Arno in Dante’s time, with her hawk on her wrist, we should have 
 had some other ideas even about horses than the best we can have now. 
 But most assuredly, nothing that ever swung at the quay sides of Carthage, 
 or glowed with crusaders’ shields above the hays of Syria, could give to any 
 contemporary human creature such an idea of the meaning of the word 
 Boat, as may he now gained by any mortal happy enough to behold as much 
 as a Newcastle collier heating against the wind. In the classical period, 
 indeed, there was some importance given to shipping as the means of 
 locking a battle-field together on the waves; but in the chivalric period, 
 the whole mind of man is withdrawn from the sea, regarding it merely as 
 a treacherous impediment, over which it was necessary sometimes to find 
 conveyance, hut from which the thoughts were always turned impatiently, 
 fixing themselves in green fields, and pleasures that may he enjoyed by 
 land—the very supremacy of the horse necessitating the scorn of the sea, 
 which would not he trodden by hoofs. 
 
 It is very interesting to note how repugnant every oceanic idea 
 appears to he to the whole nature of our principal English mediaeval poet, 
 Chaucer. Bead first the Man of Lawe’s Tale, in which the Lady Constance 
 is continually floated up and down the Mediterranean, and the German 
 Ocean, in a ship by herself; carried from Syria all the way to Northumber- 
 
THE HARBOURS OE ENGLAND. 
 
 7 
 
 land, and there wrecked upon the coast; thence yet again driven up and 
 down among the waves for five years, she and her child; and yet, all this 
 while, Chaucer does not let fall a single word descriptive of the sea, or 
 express any emotion whatever about it, or about the ship. He simply tells 
 us the lady sailed here and was wrecked there; but neither he nor his 
 audience appear to he capable of receiving any sensation, hut one of simple 
 aversion, from waves, ships, or sands. Compare with his absolutely 
 apathetic recital, the description by a modern poet of the sailing of a vessel, 
 charged with the fate of another Constance: 
 
 “ It curled not Tweed alone, that breeze — 
 
 For far upon Northumbrian seas 
 It freshly blew, and strong; 
 
 "Where from high Whitby’s cloistered pile, 
 
 Bound to St. Cuthbert’s holy isle, 
 
 It bore a bark along. 
 
 Upon the gale she stooped her side, 
 
 And bounded o’er the swelling tide 
 As she were dancing home. 
 
 The merry seamen laughed to see 
 Their gallant ship so lustily 
 Furrow the green sea foam.” 
 
 Now just as Scott enjoys this sea breeze, so does Chaucer the soft air 
 of the woods; the moment the older poet lands, he is himself again, his 
 poverty of language in speaking of the ship is not because he despises 
 description, but because he has nothing to describe. Hear him upon the 
 ground in Spring : 
 
 “ These woodes else recoveren greene, 
 
 That drie in winter ben to sene, 
 
 An d the erth waxeth proud withall, 
 
 For sweet dewes that on it fall, 
 
 And the poore estate forget, 
 
 In which that winter had it set: 
 
 An d than becomes the ground so proude, 
 That it wol have a newe shroude, 
 
 An d maketh so queint his robe and faire, 
 That it had hewes an hundred paire, 
 
 Of grasse and floures, of Inde and Pers, 
 And many hewes full divers: 
 
 That is the robe I mean ywis, 
 
 Through which the ground to praisen is.” 
 
8 
 
 TIIE HARBOURS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 In like manner, wherever throughout his poems we find Chaucer 
 enthusiastic, it is on a sunny day in the “ good greenwood,” hut the 
 slightest approach to the sea-sliore makes him shiver; and his antipathy 
 finds at last positive expression, and becomes the principal foundation of 
 the Prankeleine’s Tale, in which a lady, waiting for her husband’s 
 return in a castle by the sea, behaves and expresses herself as follows : 
 
 “ Another time wold she sit and thinke, 
 
 And cast her eyen dounward fro the hrinke; 
 
 But whan she saw the grisly rockes blake, 
 
 Eor verayfere so wold hire herte quake 
 That on hire feet she might hire not sustene 
 Than wold she sit adoun upon the grene, 
 
 And pitonsly into the see behold, 
 
 And say right thus, with careful sighes cold. 
 
 ‘ Eterne God, that thurgh thy purveance 
 Ledest this world by certain governance, 
 
 In idel, as men sain, ye nothing make. 
 
 But, lord, thise grisly fendly rockes blake, 
 
 That semen rather a foule confusion 
 Of werk, than any faire creation 
 Of swiche a parfit wise God and stable, 
 
 Why ban ye wrought this werk unresonable ? ’ ” 
 
 The desire to have the rocks out of her way is indeed severely punished 
 in the sequel of the tale; hut it is not the less characteristic of the age, 
 and well worth meditating upon, in comparison with the feelings of an 
 unsophisticated modern Trench or English girl among the black rocks 
 of Dieppe or Eamsgate. 
 
 On the other hand, much might he said about that peculiar love of 
 green fields and birds in the Middle Ages; and of all with which it is 
 connected, purity and health in manners and heart, as opposed to the 
 too frequent condition of the modern mind — 
 
 “ As for the birds in the thicket, 
 
 Thrush or ousel in leafy niche, 
 
 Linnet or finch — she was far too rich 
 To care for a morning concert to which 
 She was welcome, without a ticket.” * 
 
 But this would lead us far afield, and the main fact I have to point 
 out to the reader is the transition of human grace and strength from the 
 
 * Thomas Hood. 
 
THE HAEBOUKS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 9 
 
 exercises of the land to those of the sea in the course of the last three 
 centuries. 
 
 Down to Elizabeth’s time chivalry lasted; and grace of dress and mien, 
 and all else that was connected with chivalry. Then came the ages which, 
 when they have taken their due place in the depths of the past, will be, by 
 a wise and clear-sighted futurity, perhaps well comprehended under a 
 common name, as the ages of Starch; periods of general stiffening and 
 bluish-whitening, with a prevailing washerwoman’s taste in everything; 
 involving a change of steel armour into cambric; of natural hair into 
 peruke; of natural walking into that which will disarrange no wristbands; 
 of plain language into quips and embroideries; and of human life in 
 general, from a green race-course, where to be defeated was at worst only 
 to fall behind and recover breath, into a slippery pole, to be climbed with 
 toil and contortion, and in clinging to which, each man’s foot is on his 
 neighbour’s head. 
 
 But, meanwhile, the marine deities were incorruptible. It was not 
 possible to starch the sea; and precisely as the stiffness fastened upon men, 
 it vanished from ships. What had once been a mere raft, with rows of 
 formal benches, pushed along by laborious flap of oars, and with infinite 
 fluttering of flags and swelling of poops above, gradually began to lean 
 more heavily into the deep water, to sustain a gloomy weight of guns, to 
 draw back its spider-like feebleness of limb, and open its bosom to the 
 wind, and finally darkened down from all its painted vanities into the long, 
 low hull, familiar with the overflying foam; that has no other pride but 
 in its daily duty and victory; while, through all these changes, it gained 
 continually in grace, strength, audacity, and beauty, until at last it has 
 reached such a pitch of all these, that there is not, except the very loveliest 
 creatures of the living world, anything in nature so absolutely notable, 
 bewitching, and, according to its means and measure, heart-occupying, as 
 a well-handled ship under sail in a stormy day. Any ship, from lowest to 
 proudest, has due place in that architecture of the sea; beautiful, not 
 so much in this or that piece of it, as in the unity of all, from cottage to 
 cathedral, into their great buoyant dynasty. Yet, among them, the fisher- 
 boat, corresponding to the cottage on the land (only far more sublime 
 than a cottage ever can be), is on the whole the thing most venerable. I 
 doubt if ever academic grove were half so fit for profitable medita¬ 
 tion as the little strip of shingle between two black, steep, overhanging 
 sides of stranded fishing-boats. The clear, heavy water-edge of ocean 
 
 c 
 
10 
 
 THE HAEBOTJES OF ENGLAND. 
 
 rising and falling close to tlieir hows, in that unaccountable w r ay which 
 the sea has always in calm weather, turning the pebbles over and over 
 as if with a rake, to look for something, and then stopping a moment 
 down at the bottom of the hank, and coming up again with a little 
 run and clash, throwing a foot’s depth of salt crystal in an instant 
 between you and the round stone you were going to take in your hand; 
 sighing, all the while, as if it would infinitely rather he doing something 
 else. And the dark flanks of the fishing-boats all aslope above, in their 
 shining quietness, hot in the morning sun, rusty and seamed with square 
 patches of plank nailed over their rents; just rough enough to let the little 
 flat-footed fisher-cliildren haul or twist themselves up to the gunwales, and 
 drop hack again along some stray rope; just round enough to remind us, 
 in their broad and gradual curves, of the sweep of the green surges they 
 know so w r ell, and of the hours when those old sides of seared timber, all 
 asliine with the sea, plunge and dip into the deep green purity of the 
 mounded waves more joyfully than a deer lies down among the grass of 
 spring, the soft white cloud of foam opening momentarily at the hows, 
 and fading or flying high into the breeze where the sea-gulls toss and 
 shriek,—the joy and beauty of it, all the wdiile, so mingled with the 
 sense of unfathomable danger, and the human effort and sorrow going on 
 perpetually from age to age, waves rolling for ever, and winds moaning 
 for ever, and faithful hearts trusting and sickening for ever, and brave 
 lives dashed away about the rattling beach like weeds for ever; and still 
 at the helm of every lonely boat, through starless night and hopeless 
 dawm, His hand, who spread the fisher’s net over the dust of the Sido- 
 nian palaces, and gave into the fisher’s hand the keys of the kingdom of 
 heaven. 
 
 Next after the fisliing-hoat—which, as I said, in the architecture of 
 the sea represents the cottage, more especially the pastoral or agricultural 
 cottage, watchful over some pathless domain of moorland or arable, as the 
 fisliing-hoat swims humbly in the midst of the broad green fields and hills 
 of ocean, out of which it has to win such fruit as they can give, and to com¬ 
 pass with net or drag such flocks as it may find,—next to this ocean-cottage 
 ranks in interest, it seems to me, the small, over-wrought, under-crcw r ed, 
 ill-caulked merchant brig or schooner; the kind of ship which first shows 
 its couple of thin masts over the low fields or marshes as we near any 
 third-rate seaport; and which is sure somewhere to stud the great space of 
 glittering water, seen from any sea-cliff, with its four or five square-set sails. 
 
THE HARBOURS OE ENGLAND. 
 
 11 
 
 Of the larger and more polite tribes of merchant vessels, three-masted, and 
 passenger-carrying, I have nothing to say, feeling in general little sympathy 
 with people who want to go anywhere ; nor caring much about anything, 
 which in the essence of it expresses a desire to get to other sides of the 
 world; but only for homely and stay-at-home ships, that live their life 
 and die their death about English rocks. Neither have I any interest in 
 the higher branches of commerce, such as traffic with spice islands, and 
 porterage of painted tea-chests or carved ivory; for all this seems to me 
 to fall under the head of commerce of the drawingroom; costly, but not 
 venerable. I respect in the merchant service only those ships that carry 
 coals, herrings, salt, timber, iron, and such other commodities, and that 
 have disagreeable odour, and unwashed decks. But there are few things 
 more impressive to me than one of these ships lying up against some lonely 
 quay in a black sea-fog, with the furrow traced under its tawny keel far in 
 the harbour slime. The noble misery that there is in it, the might of its 
 rent and strained unseemliness, its wave-worn melancholy, resting there for 
 a little while in the comfortless ebb, unpitied, and claiming no pity; still 
 less honoured, least of all conscious of any claim to honour; casting and 
 craning by due balance whatever is in its hold up to the pier, in quiet truth 
 of time; spinning of wheel, and slackening of rope, and swinging of spade, 
 in as accurate cadence as a waltz music; one or two of its crew, perhaps, 
 away forward, and a hungry boy and yelping dog eagerly interested in 
 something from which a blue dull smoke rises out of pot or pan; but 
 dark-browed and silent, their limbs slack, like the ropes above them, 
 entangled as they are in those inextricable meshes about the patched knots 
 and heaps of ill-reefed sable sail. What a majestic sense of service in all 
 that languor! the rest of human limbs and hearts, at utter need, not in 
 sweet meadows or soft air, but in harbour slime and biting fog; so drawing 
 their breath once more, to go out again, without lament, from between the 
 two skeletons of pier-lieads, vocal with wash of under wave, into the grey 
 troughs of tumbling brine; there, as they can, with slacked rope, and patched 
 sail, and leaky hull, again to roll and stagger far away amidst the wind and 
 salt sleet, from dawn to dusk and dusk to dawn, winning day by day their 
 daily bread; and for last reward, when their old hands, on some winter 
 night, lose feeling along the frozen ropes, and their old eyes miss mark of 
 the lighthouse quenched in foam, the so-long impossible Best, that shall 
 hunger no more, neither thirst any more, — their eyes and mouths filled 
 with the brown sea-sand. 
 
12 
 
 THE HARBOURS OE ENGLAND. 
 
 After these most venerable, to my mind, of all ships, properly so styled, 
 I find nothing 1 of comparable interest in any floating fabric until we come 
 to the great achievement of the 19th century. For one tiling this century 
 will in after ages he considered to have done in a superb manner, and one 
 thing, I think, only. It has not distinguished itself in political spheres; 
 still less in artistical. It has produced no golden age by its Reason; neither 
 does it appear eminent for the constancy of its Faith. Its telescopes and 
 telegraphs would be creditable to it, if it had not in their pursuit forgotten 
 in great part how to see clearly with its eyes, and to talk honestly with its 
 tongue. Its natural history might have been creditable to it also, if it 
 could have conquered its habit of considering natural history to be mainly 
 the art of writing Latin names on white tickets. But, as it is, none of 
 these things will be hereafter considered to have been got on with by us 
 as well as might be; whereas it will always be said of us, with unabated 
 reverence, 
 
 “ THEY BUILT SHIPS OP THE LINE.” 
 
 Take it all in all, a Ship of the Line is the most honourable thing that 
 man, as a gregarious animal, has ever produced. By himself, unlielped, he 
 can do better things than ships of the line ; he can make poems and pictures, 
 and other such concentrations of what is best in him. But as a being living in 
 flocks, and hammering out, with alternate strokes and mutual agreement, 
 what is necessary for him in those flocks, to get or produce, the ship of the 
 line is his first work. Into that he has put as much of his human patience, 
 common sense, forethought, experimental philosophy, self-control, habits 
 of order and obedience, thoroughly wrought handwork, defiance of brute 
 elements, careless courage, careful patriotism, and calm expectation of the 
 judgment of God, as can well be put into a space of 300 feet long by 80 
 broad. And I am thankful to have lived in an age when I could see this 
 thing so done. 
 
 Considering, then, our shipping, under the three principal types of 
 fishing-boat, collier, and ship of the line, as the great glory of this age; and 
 the “New Forest” of mast and yard that follows the windings of the 
 Thames, to be, take it all in all, a more majestic scene, I don’t say merely 
 than any of our streets or palaces as they now are; but even than the best 
 that streets and palaces can generally be; it has often been a matter of 
 serious thought to me how far this chiefly substantial thing done by 
 the nation ought to be represented by the art of the nation; how far 
 our great artists ought seriously to devote themselves to such perfect 
 
THE HAEBOURS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 13 
 
 painting of our ships as should reveal to later generations—lost perhaps in 
 clouds of steam and floating troughs of ashes—the aspect of an ancient 
 ship of battle under sail. 
 
 To which, I fear, the answer must be sternly this: That no great art 
 ever was, or can he, employed in the careful imitation of the work of man 
 as its principal subject. That is to say, art will not bear to be reduplicated. 
 A ship is a noble thing, and a cathedral a noble thing, but a painted ship 
 or a painted cathedral is not a noble thing. Art which reduplicates art is 
 necessarily second-rate art. I know no principle more irrefragably authori¬ 
 tative than that which I had long ago occasion to express : “All noble art is 
 the expression of man’s delight in God’s work; not in his own.” 
 
 “How!” it will be asked, “Are Stanfield, Isabey, and Prout neces¬ 
 sarily artists of the second order because they paint ships and buildings 
 instead of trees and clouds?” Yes, necessarily of the second order; so 
 far as they paint ships rather than sea, and so far as they paint buildings 
 rather than the natural light, and colour, and work of years upon those 
 buildings. For, in this respect, a ruined building is a noble subject, just 
 as far as man’s work has therein been subdued by nature’s; and Stanfield’s 
 chief dignity is his being a painter less of shipping than of the seal of 
 time or decay upon shipping.* For a wrecked ship, or shattered boat, is 
 a noble subject, while a ship in full sail, or a perfect boat, is an ignoble 
 one; not merely because the one is by reason of its ruin more pic¬ 
 turesque than the other, but because it is a nobler act in man to meditate 
 upon Fate as it conquers his work, than upon that work itself. 
 
 Shipping, therefore, in its perfection, never can become the subject of 
 noble art; and that just because to represent it in its perfection would tax 
 the powers of art to the utmost. If a great painter could rest, in drawing 
 a ship, as he can rest in drawing a piece of drapery, we might sometimes see 
 vessels introduced by the noblest workmen, and treated by them with as 
 much delight as they would show in scattering lustre over an embroidered 
 dress, or knitting the links of a coat of mail. But ships cannot be drawn 
 at times of rest. More complicated in their anatomy than the human 
 frame itself, so far as that frame is outwardly discernible; liable to all 
 kinds of strange accidental variety in position and movement, yet in each 
 position subject to imperative laws which can only be followed by unerring 
 knowledge ; and involving, in the roundings and foldings of sail and hull, 
 delicacies of drawing greater than exist in any other inorganic object, except 
 
 * As in the very beautiful picture of this year’s Academy, “ The Abandoned.” 
 
14 
 
 THE HARBOURS OE ENGLAND. 
 
 perhaps a snow wreath*,—they present, irrespective of sea or sky, or 
 anything else around them, difficulties which could only be vanquished by 
 draughtsmanship quite accomplished enough to render even the subtlest 
 lines of the human face and form. But the artist who has once attained 
 such skill as this will not devote it to the drawing of ships. He who can 
 paint the face of St. Paul will not elaborate the parting timbers of the 
 vessel in which he is wrecked; and he who can represent the astonishment 
 of the apostles at the miraculous draught will not he solicitous about 
 accurately showing that their boat is overloaded. 
 
 “What!” it will perhaps he replied, “have, then, ships never been 
 painted perfectly yet, even by the men who have devoted most attention to 
 them ?” Assuredly not. A ship never yet has been painted at all, in any 
 other sense than men have been painted in “Landscapes with figures.” 
 Things have been painted which have a general effect of ships, just as things 
 have beenpainted which have a general effect of shepherds or banditti; hut 
 the best average ship-painting no more reaches the truth of ships than the 
 equestrian troops in one of Van der Meulen’s battle-pieces express the 
 higher truths of humanity. 
 
 Take a single instance. I do not know any work in which, on the whole, 
 there is a more unaffected love of ships for their own sake, and a fresher 
 feeling of sea breeze always blowing, than Stanfield’s “Coast Scenery.” 
 Now, let the reader take up that hook, and look through all the plates of it 
 at the way in which the most important parts of a ship’s skeleton are drawn, 
 those most wonderful junctions of mast with mast, corresponding to the 
 knee or hip in the human frame, technically known as “ Tops.” Under 
 its very simplest form, in one of those poor collier brigs, which I have above 
 endeavoured to recommend to the reader’s affection, the junction of the top- 
 gallant-mast with the topmast, when the sail is reefed, will present itself 
 under no less complex and mysterious form than this in Big. 1., a horned 
 knot of seven separate pieces of timber, irrespective of the two masts and 
 the yard ; the whole balanced and involved in an apparently inextricable web 
 of chain and rope, consisting of at least sixteen ropes about the top-gallant- 
 mast, and some twenty-five crossing each other in every imaginable degree 
 of slackness and slope about the topmast. Two thirds of these ropes are 
 
 * The catenary and other curves of tension which a sail assumes under the united 
 influence of the wind, its own weight, and the particular tensions of the various ropes by which 
 it is attached, or against which it presses, show at any moment complexities of arrangement 
 to which fidelity, except after the study of a lifetime, is impossible. 
 
THE HARBOURS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 15 
 
 omitted in the cut, because I could not draw them without taking more 
 time and pains than the point to be illustrated was worth; the thing, as it 
 is, being drawn quite well enough to give some idea of the facts of it. 
 Well, take up Stanfield’s “ Coast Scenery,” and look through it in search 
 of tops, and you will invariably find them represented as in Pig. 2., or 
 even with fewer lines; the example Pig. 2. being one of the tops of the 
 frigate running into Portsmouth harbour, magnified to about twice its 
 size in the plate. 
 
 Fig. 2. 
 
 Fig. 1. 
 
 “ Well, but it was impossible to do more on so small a scale.” By no 
 means: but take what scale you choose, of Stanfield’s or any other marine 
 painter’s most elaborate painting, and let me magnify the study of the real 
 top in proportion, and the deficiency of detail will always be lound equally 
 great: I mean in the work of the higher artists, for there are of course 
 many efforts at greater accuracy of delineation by those painters of ships 
 who are to the higher marine painter what botanical draughtsmen are to 
 the landscapists; but just as in the botanical engraving the spirit and life 
 of the plant are always lost, so in the technical ship-painting the life of the 
 ship is always lost, without, as far as I can see, attaining, even by this 
 sacrifice, anything like completeness of mechanical delineation. At least, 
 I never saw the ship drawn yet which gave me the slightest idea of the 
 entanglement of real rigging. 
 
16 
 
 THE HARBOURS OE ENGLAND. 
 
 Respecting this lower kind of ship-painting, it is always matter of 
 wonder to me that it satisfies sailors. Some years ago I happened to stand 
 longer than pleased my pensioner guide before Turner’s “ Battle of Tra¬ 
 falgar,” at Greenwich Hospital; and my guide, supposing me to he detained 
 by indignant wonder at seeing it in so good a place, assented to my supposed 
 sentiments by muttering in a low voice: “Well, sir, it is a shame that that 
 thing should be there. We ought to ’a ’ad a Uggins; that’s sartain.” 
 I was not surprised that my sailor friend should be disgusted at seeing the 
 “ Victory” lifted nearly right out of the water, and all the sails of the fleet 
 blowing about to that extent that the crews might as well have tried to reef 
 as many thunder-clouds. But I was surprised at his perfect repose of 
 respectful faith in “Uggins,” who appeared to me — unfortunate landsman 
 as I was — to give no more idea of the look of a ship of the line going 
 through the sea, than might be obtained from seeing one of the correct 
 models at the top of the hall floated in a fishpond. 
 
 Leaving, however, the sailor to his enjoyment, on such grounds as it 
 may be, of this model drawing, and being prepared to find only a vague 
 and hasty shadowing forth of shipping in the works of artists proper, 
 we will glance briefly at the different stages of excellence which such 
 shadowing forth has reached, and note in their consecutive changes the 
 feelings with which shipping has been regarded at different periods of art. 
 
 1. Mediaeval Period. The vessel is regarded merely as a sort of 
 sea-carriage, and painted only so far as it is necessary for complete 
 display of the groups of soldiers or saints on the deck: a great deal of 
 quaint shipping, richly hung with shields, and gorgeous with banners, is, 
 however, thus incidentally represented in 15th-century manuscripts, em¬ 
 bedded in curly green waves of sea full of long fish; and although there 
 is never the slightest expression of real sea character, of motion, gloom, 
 or spray, there is more real interest of marine detail and incident than 
 in many later compositions. 
 
 2. Early Venetian Period. A great deal of tolerably careful boat¬ 
 drawing occurs in the pictures of Carpaccio and Gentile Bellini, deserving 
 separate mention among the marine schools, in confirmation of what has 
 been stated above, that the drawing of boats is more difficult than that of 
 the human form. For, long after all the perspectives and fore-shorten¬ 
 ings of the human body were completely understood, as well as those of 
 architecture, it remained utterly beyond the power of the artists of the time 
 to draw a boat with even tolerable truth. Boats are always tilted up on 
 
THE HARBOUKS OE ENGLAND. 
 
 17 
 
 end, or too long, or too short, or too high in the water. Generally they 
 appear to he regarded with no interest whatever, and are painted merely 
 where they are matters of necessity. This is perfectly natural: we pro¬ 
 nounce that there is romance in the Yenetian conveyance hy oars, merely 
 because we ourselves are in the liahit of being dragged hy horses. A Vene¬ 
 tian, on the other hand sees vulgarity in a gondola, and thinks the only true 
 romance is in a hackney coach. And thus, it was no more likely that a 
 painter in the days of Yenetian power should pay much attention to the 
 shipping in the Grand Canal, than that an English artist should at present 
 concentrate the brightest rays of his genius on a cab-stand. 
 
 3. Late Venetian Period. Deserving mention only for its notably 
 negative character. None of the great Yenetian painters, Tintoret, Titian* 
 Veronese, Bellini, Giorgione, Bonifazio, ever introduce a ship if they can 
 help it. They delight in ponderous architecture, in grass, flowers, blue 
 mountains, skies, clouds, and gay dresses; nothing comes amiss to them 
 hut ships and the sea. When they are forced to introduce these, they 
 represent merely a dark-green plain, with reddish galleys spotted about it 
 here and there, looking much like small models of shipping pinned on a 
 green hoard. In their marine battles, there is seldom anything discernible 
 except long rows of scarlet oars, and men in armour falling helplessly 
 through them. 
 
 4. Late Roman Period. That is to say, the time of the beginning of 
 the Renaissance landscape hy the Caracci, Claude, and Salvator. Eirst, in 
 their landscapes, shipping begins to assume something like independent 
 character, and to he introduced for the sake of its picturesque interest; 
 although what interest could he taken by any healthy human creature in 
 such vessels as were then painted has always remained a mystery to me. 
 The ships of Claude, having hulls of a shape something between a cocoa- 
 nut and a liigh-lieeled shoe, balanced on their keels on the top of the 
 water, with some scaffolding and cross-sticks above, and a flag at the top of 
 every stick, form perhaps the purest exhibition of human inanity and fatuity 
 which the arts have yet produced. The harbours also, in which these 
 model navies ride, are worthy of all observation for the intensity of the false 
 taste which, endeavouring to unite in them the characters of pleasure- 
 ground and port, destroys the veracity of both. There are many inlets 
 of the Italian seas where sweet gardens and regular terraces descend to 
 the water’s edge; hut these are not the spots where merchant vessels 
 anchor, or where hales are disembarked. On the other hand, there are 
 
 D 
 
18 
 
 THE HARBOURS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 many busy quays and noisy arsenals upon tlie shores of Italy; but 
 Queens’ palaces are not built upon the quays, nor are the docks in any 
 wise adorned with conservatories or ruins. It was reserved for tbe 
 genius of Claude to combine the luxurious with the lucrative, and rise 
 to a commercial ideal, in which cables are fastened to temple pillars, 
 and lighthouses adorned with rows of beaupots. It seems strange also 
 that any power which Salvator showed in the treatment of other subjects 
 utterly deserts him when he approaches the sea. Though always coarse, 
 false, and vulgar, he has at least energy, and some degree of invention, 
 as long as he remains on land; his terrestrial atrocities are animated, and 
 his rock-born fancies formidable. But the sea air seems to dim his sight 
 and paralyze his hand. His love of darkness and destruction, far from 
 seeking sympathy in the rage of ocean, disappears as he approaches the 
 beach ; after having tortured the innocence of trees into demoniac convul¬ 
 sions, and shattered the loveliness of purple hills into colourless dislocation, 
 he approaches the real wrath and restlessness of ocean without either 
 admiration or dismay, and appears to feel nothing at its shore except a 
 meagre interest in bathers, fishermen, and gentlemen in court dress bar¬ 
 gaining for state cabins. Of all the pictures by men who bear the reputa¬ 
 tion of great masters which I have ever seen in my life (except only some 
 by Domenichino), the two large “Marines ” in the Pitti Palace, attributed 
 to Salvator, are, on the whole, the most vapid and vile examples of 
 human want of understanding. In the folly of Claude there is still a gleam 
 of grace and innocence; there is refreshment in his childishness, and ten¬ 
 derness in his inability. But the folly of Salvator is disgusting in its very 
 nothingness : it is like the vacuity of a plague-room in an hospital, shut up 
 in uncleansed silence, emptied of pain and motion, but not of infection. 
 
 5. Dutch Period. Although in artistical qualities lower than is easily 
 by language expressible, the Italian marine painting usually conveys an 
 idea of three facts about the sea, — that it is green, that it is deep, and 
 that the sun shines on it. The dark plain which stands for far away 
 Adriatic with the Venetians, and the glinting swells of tamed wave which 
 lap about the quays of Claude, agree in giving the general impression that 
 the ocean consists of pure water, and is open to the pure sky. But the 
 Dutch painters, while they attained considerably greater dexterity than the 
 Italian in mere delineation of nautical incident, were by nature precluded 
 from ever becoming aware of these common facts; and having, in reality, 
 never in all their lives seen the sea, but onlv a shallow mixture of sea-water 
 
THE HARBOURS OE ENGLAND. 
 
 19 
 
 and sand; and also never in all tlieir lives seen the sky, hut only a lower 
 element between them and it, composed of marsh exhalation and fog-hank; 
 they are not to he with too great severity reproached for the dulness of 
 their records of the nautical enterprise of Holland. IVe only are to be 
 reproached, who, familiar with the Atlantic, are yet ready to accept with 
 faith, as types of sea, the small waves en papillote, andperuke-like puffs 
 of farinaceous foam, which were the delight of Backliuysen and his com¬ 
 peers. If one could hut arrest the connoisseurs in the fact of looking at 
 them with belief, and, magically introducing the image of a true sea-wave, 
 let it roll up to them through the room,—one massive fathom’s height and 
 rood’s breadth of brine, passing them by hut once,—dividing, Bed Sea-like, 
 on right hand and left,—hut at least setting close before their eyes, for 
 once in inevitable truth, what a sea-wave really is; its green moun¬ 
 tainous giddiness of wrath, its overwhelming crest—heavy as iron, fitful 
 as flame, clashing against the sky in long cloven edge,—its furrowed 
 flanks, all ghastly clear, deep in transparent death, hut all laced across 
 with lurid nets of spume, and tearing open into meshed interstices their 
 churned veil of silver fury, showing still the calm grey abyss below; 
 that has no fury and no voice, hut is as a grave always open, which the 
 green sighing mounds do but hide for an instant as they pass. Would 
 they, shuddering hack from this wave of the true, implacable sea, turn 
 forthwith to the papillotes ? It might he so. It is w hat we are all doing, 
 more or less, continually. 
 
 Well, let the waves go their way; it is not of them that w r e have 
 here to reason; hut he it remembered, that men who cannot enter into 
 the Mind of the Sea, cannot for the same reason enter into the Mind of 
 Ships, in their contention with it; and the fluttering, tottering, high- 
 pooped, flag-beset fleets of these Hutch painters have only this much 
 superiority over the caricatures of the Italians, that they indeed appear 
 in some degree to have been studied from the high-pooped and flag-beset 
 nature which was in that age visible, while the Claude and Salvator 
 ships are ideals of the studio. But the effort is wholly unsuccessful. 
 Any one who has ever attempted to sketch a vessel in motion knows 
 that he might as easily attempt to sketch a bird on the wing; or a 
 trout on the dart. Ships can only he drawn, as animals must he, hv the 
 high instinct of momentary perception, which rarely developed itself in 
 any Hutch painter, and least of all in their painters of marine. And thus 
 the awkw'ard forms of shipping, the shallow impurity of the sea, and the 
 
20 
 
 THE HAEBOTJES OF ENGLAND. 
 
 cold incapacity of tlie painter, joining in disadvantageous influence over 
 them, the Dutch marine paintings may he simply, hut circumstantially, 
 described as the misrepresentation of undeveloped shipping in a dis¬ 
 coloured sea by distempered painters. An exception ought to he made 
 in favour of the boats of Cuyp, which are generally well floated in calm 
 and sunny water; and, though rather punts or tubs than boats, have in 
 them some elements of a slow, warm, square-sailed, sleepy grandeur— 
 respectable always, when compared either with the flickering follies 
 of Backhuysen, or the monstrous, unmanly, and, a fortiori , unsailorly, 
 absurdities of metaphysical vessels, puffed on their way by corpulent genii, 
 or pushed by protuberant dolphins, which Rubens and the other so-called 
 historical painters of his time were accustomed to introduce in the mytho¬ 
 logy of their court-adulation; that marvellous Eaitli of the 18th century, 
 which will one day, and that not far off, he known for a thing more 
 truly disgraceful to human nature than the Polynesian’s dance round 
 his feather idol, or Egyptian’s worship of the food he fattened on. Erom 
 Salvator and Domenichino it is possible to turn in a proud indignation, 
 knowing that theirs are no fair examples of the human mind; hut it is 
 with humbled and woful anger that we must trace the degradation of the 
 intellect of Bubens in his pictures of the life of Mary of Medicis.* 
 
 6. Modern Period. The gradual appreciation of the true character 
 both of shipping and the ocean, in the works of the painters of the last half 
 century, is part of that successful study of other elements of landscape, of 
 which I have long laboured at a consistent investigation, now partly laid 
 
 * “ The town of Lyons, seated upon a chariot drawn by two lions, lifts its eyes towards 
 heaven, and admires there — ‘ les nouveaux Epoux,’ — represented in the character of Jupiter 
 and Juno.” — Notice des Tableaux du Musee Imperial, 2nde partie, Paris, 1854, p. 235. 
 
 “ The Queen upon her throne holds with one hand the sceptre, in the other the balance. 
 Minerva and Cupid are at her sides. Abundance and Prosperity distribute medals, laurels, ‘ et 
 d’autres recompenses,’ to the Genii of the Fine Arts. Time, crowned with the productions of 
 the seasons, leads France to the — Age of Gold!” — p.239. 
 
 So thought the Queen, and Eubens, and the Court. Time himself, ‘‘crowned with the 
 productions of the seasons,” was, meanwhile, as Thomas Carlyle would have told us, “ quite of 
 another opinion.” 
 
 "With view of arrival at Golden Age all the sooner, the Court determine to go by water; 
 “ and Marie de Medicis gives to her son the government of the state, under the emblem of a 
 vessel, of which he holds the rudder.” 
 
 This piece of royal pilotage, being on the whole the most characteristic example I 
 remember of the Mythological marine above alluded to, is accordingly recommended to the 
 reader’s serious attention. 
 
THE HARBOURS OE ENGLAND. 
 
 21 
 
 before the public ; I shall not, therefore, here enter into any general 
 inquiry respecting modern sea-painting, but limit myself to a notice of 
 the particular feelings which influenced Turner in his marine studies, 
 so far as they are shown in the series of plates which have now been 
 trusted to me for illustration. 
 
 Among the earliest sketches from nature which Turner appears to 
 have made, in pencil and Indian ink, when a boy of twelve or fourteen, it is 
 very singular how large a proportion consists of careful studies of stranded 
 boats. Now, after some fifteen years of conscientious labour, with the 
 single view of acquiring knowledge of the ends and powers of art, I have 
 come to one conclusion, which at the beginning of those fifteen years 
 would have been very astonishing to myself—that, of all our modern 
 school of landscape painters, next to Turner, and before the rise of the 
 Pre-Raphaelites, the man whose works are on the whole most valuable, 
 and show the highest intellect, is Samuel Prout. It is very notable that 
 also in Prout’s early studies, shipping subjects took not merely a pro¬ 
 minent, but I think even a principal, place. 
 
 The reason of this is very evident: both Turner and Prout had in 
 them an untaught, inherent perception of what was great and pictorial. 
 They could not find it in the buildings or in the scenes immediately around 
 them. But they saw some element of real power in the boats. Prout 
 afterwards found material suited to his genius in other directions and 
 left his first love; but Turner retained the early affection to the close of 
 his life, and the last oil picture which he painted, before his noble hand 
 forgot its cunning, was the Wreck-buoy. The last thoroughly perfect 
 picture he ever painted, was the Old Temeraire. 
 
 The studies which he was able to make from nature in his early years, 
 are chiefly of fishing-boats, barges, and other minor marine still life; and 
 his better acquaintance with this kind of shipping than with the larger 
 kind is very marked in the Liber Studiorum, in which there are five 
 careful studies of fishing-boats under various circumstances; namely, 
 Calais Harbour, Sir John Mildmay’s Picture, Plint Castle, Marine Dab¬ 
 blers, and the Calm; while of other shipping, there are only two subjects, 
 both exceedingly unsatisfactory. 
 
 Turner, however, deemed it necessary to his reputation at that period 
 that he should paint pictures in the style of Vandevelde; and, in order to 
 render the resemblance more complete, he appears to have made careful 
 drawings of the different parts of old Dutch shipping. I found a large 
 
22 
 
 THE HARBOURS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 number of such drawings among the contents of bis neglected portfo¬ 
 lios at his death; some were clearly not by his own band, others appeared 
 to be transcripts by him from prints or earlier drawings; the quantity 
 altogether was very great, and the evidence of his prolonged attention to 
 the subject more distinct than with respect to any other element of land¬ 
 scape. Of plants, rocks, or architecture, there were very few careful 
 pieces of anatomical study. But several drawers were entirely filled with 
 these memoranda of shipping. 
 
 In executing the series of drawings for the work known as the 
 Southern Coast, Turner appears to have gained many ideas about ship¬ 
 ping, which, once received, he laid up by him for use in after years. The 
 evidence of this laying by of thought in his mind, as it were in reserve, 
 until he had power to express it, is curious and complete throughout his 
 life ; and although the Southern Coast drawings are for the most part quiet 
 in feeling and remarkably simple in their mode of execution, I believe 
 it was in the watch over the Cornish and Dorsetshire coast, which the 
 making of those drawings involved, that he received all his noblest ideas 
 about sea and ships. 
 
 Of one thing I am certain ; Turner never drew anything that could be 
 seen, without having seen it. That is to say, though he would draw 
 Jerusalem from some one else’s sketch, it would be, nevertheless, entirely 
 from his own experience of ruined walls: and though he would draw 
 ancient shipping (for an imitation of Yandevelde, or a vignette to the 
 voyage of Columbus) from such data as he could get about things which 
 he could no more see with his own eyes, yet when, of his own free will, in 
 the subject of Ilfracombe, he, in the year 1818, introduces a shipwreck, I 
 am perfectly certain that, before the year 1818, he had seen a shipwreck, 
 and moreover, one of that horrible kind—a ship dashed to pieces in deep 
 water, at the foot of an inaccessible cliff. Having once seen this, I per¬ 
 ceive, also, that the image of it could not be effaced from his mind. It 
 taught him two great facts, which he never afterwards forgot; namely, 
 that both ships and sea were things that broke to pieces. He never 
 afterwards painted a ship quite in fair order. There is invariably a feeling 
 about his vessels of strange awe and danger; the sails are in some way 
 loosening, or flapping as if in fear; the swing of the hull, majestic as it 
 may be, seems more at the mercy of the sea than in triumph over it; 
 the ship never looks gay, never proud, only warlike and enduring. The 
 motto he chose, in the Catalogue of the Academy, for the most cheerful 
 
THE HARBOTJES OE ENGLAND. 
 
 23 
 
 marine he ever painted, the Sun of Venice going to Sea, marked the 
 uppermost feeling in his mind: 
 
 “ Nor heeds the Demon that in grim repose 
 Expects his evening prey.” 
 
 I noticed above the subject of his last marine picture, the Wreck-buoy, 
 and I am well persuaded that from that year 1818, when first he saw a 
 ship rent asunder, he never beheld one at sea, without, in his mind’s eye, at 
 the same instant, seeing her skeleton. 
 
 But he had seen more than the death of the ship. He had seen the 
 sea feed her white flames on souls of men; and heard what a storm-gust 
 sounded, like, that had taken up with it, in its swirl of a moment, the last 
 breaths of a ship’s crew. He never forgot either the sight or the sound. 
 Among the last plates prepared by his own hand for the Liber Studiorum, 
 (all of them, as was likely from his advanced knowledge, finer than any 
 previous pieces of the series, and most of them unfortunately never pub¬ 
 lished, being retained beside him for some last touch—for ever delayed,) 
 perhaps the most important is one of the body of a drowned sailor, dashed 
 against a vertical rock in the jaws of one merciless, immeasurable wave. 
 He repeated the same idea, though more feebly expressed, later in life, in a 
 small drawing of Grandville, on the coast of Prance. The sailor clinging 
 to the boat in the marvellous drawing of Dunbar is another reminiscence 
 of the same kind. He hardly ever painted a steep rocky coast without 
 some fragment of a devoured ship, grinding in the blanched teeth of the 
 surges,—just enough left to be a token of utter destruction. Of his two 
 most important paintings of definite shipwreck I shall speak presently. 
 
 I said that at this period he first was assured of another fact, namely, 
 that the Sea also was a thing that broke to pieces. The sea up to that time 
 had been generally regarded by painters as a liquidly composed, level-seeking, 
 consistent thing, with a smooth surface, rising to a water-mark on sides of 
 ships; in which ships were scientifically to be embedded, and wetted, up to 
 said water-mark, and to remain dry above the same. But Turner found 
 during his Southern Coast tour that the sea was not this : that it was, on the 
 contrary, a very incalculable and unhorizontal thing, setting its “ water¬ 
 mark ” sometimes on the highest heavens, as well as on sides of ships;—very 
 breakable into pieces; half of a wave separable from the other half, and 
 on the instant carriageable miles inland;—not in any wise limiting itself 
 
24 
 
 THE HARBOURS OE ENGLAND. 
 
 to a state of apparent liquidity, but now striking like a steel gauntlet, and 
 now becoming a cloud, and vanishing, no eye could tell whither; one 
 moment a flint cave, the next a marble pillar, the next a mere white fleece 
 thickening the thundery rain. He never forgot those facts; never after¬ 
 wards was able to recover the idea of positive distinction between sea and 
 sky, or sea and land. Steel gauntlet, black rock, white cloud, and men and 
 masts gnashed to pieces and disappearing in a few breaths and splinters 
 among them ;—a little blood on the rock angle, like red sea-weed, sponged 
 away by the next splash of the foam, and the glistering granite and green 
 water all pure again in vacant wrath. So stayed by him, for ever, the 
 Image of the Sea. 
 
 One effect of this revelation of the nature of ocean to him was not a little 
 singular. It seemed that ever afterwards his appreciation of the calmness 
 of water was deepened by what he had witnessed of its frenzy, and a cer¬ 
 tain class of entirely tame subjects were treated by him even with increased 
 affection after he had seen the full manifestation of sublimity. He had 
 always a great regard for canal boats, and instead of sacrificing these old, 
 and one would have thought unentertaining, friends to the deities of Storm, 
 he seems to have returned with a lulling pleasure from the foam and danger 
 of the beach to the sedgy bank and stealthy barge of the lowland river. 
 Thenceforward his work which introduces shipping is divided into two 
 classes; one embodying the poetry of silence and calmness, the other of 
 turbulence and wrath. Of intermediate conditions he gives few examples ; 
 if he lets the wind down upon the sea at all, it is nearly always violent, and 
 though the waves may not be running high, the foam is torn off them in a 
 way which shows they will soon run higher. On the other hand, nothing 
 is so perfectly calm as Turner’s calmness. To the canal barges of England 
 he soon added other types of languid motion; the broad-ruddered barques 
 of the Loire, the drooping sails of Seine, the arcaded barques of the Italian 
 lakes slumbering on expanse of mountain-guarded wave, the dreamy prows 
 of pausing gondolas on lagoons at moon-rise; in each and all command¬ 
 ing an intensity of calm, chiefly because be never admitted an instant’s 
 rigidity. The surface of quiet water with other painters becomes fixed. 
 With Turner it looks as if a fairy’s breath would stir it, but the fairy’s 
 breath is not there. So also his boats are intensely motionless, because 
 intensely capable of motion. No other painter ever floated a boat quite 
 rightly ; all other boats stand on the water, or are fastened in it; only his 
 float in it. It is very difficult to trace the reasons of this, for the rightness 
 
THE HARBOURS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 25 
 
 of the placing on the water depends on such subtle curves and shadows in 
 the floating object and its reflection, that in most cases the question of 
 entirely right or entirely wrong resolves itself into the “ estimation of an 
 hair:” and what makes the matter more difficult still, is, that sometimes we 
 may see a boat drawn with the most studied correctness in every part, which 
 yet will not swim; and sometimes we may find one drawn with many easily 
 ascertainable errors, which yet swims well enough ; so that the drawing of 
 boats is something like the building of them, one may set off their lines by 
 the most authentic rules, and yet never be sure they will sail well. It is 
 however to he observed, that Turner seemed, in those southern coast 
 storms, to have been somewhat too strongly impressed by the disappear¬ 
 ance of smaller crafts in surf, and was wont afterwards to give an uncom¬ 
 fortable aspect even to his gentlest seas, by burying his boats too deeply. 
 When he erred, in this or other matters, it was not from want of pains, for 
 of all accessories to landscape, ships were throughout his life those which he 
 studied with the greatest care. His figures, whatever their merit or demerit, 
 are certainly never the beloved part of his work ; and though the architec¬ 
 ture was in his early drawings careful, and continued to he so down to the 
 Hakewell’s Italy series, it soon became mannered and false whenever it 
 was principal. He would indeed draw a ruined tower, or a distant town, 
 incomparably better than any one else, and a staircase or a bit of balus¬ 
 trade very carefully; hut his temples and cathedrals showed great igno¬ 
 rance of detail, and want of understanding of their character. But I am 
 aware of no painting from the beginning of his life to its close, con¬ 
 taining modern shipping as its principal subject, in which he did not put 
 forth his full strength, and pour out his knowledge of detail with a joy 
 which renders those works, as a series, among the most valuable he ever 
 produced. Take for instance: 
 
 1. Lord Yarborough’s Shipwreck. 
 
 2. The Trafalgar, at Greenwich Hospital. 
 
 3. The Trafalgar, in his own gallery. 
 
 4. The Pas de Calais. 
 
 5. The Large Cologne. 
 
 6. The Havre. 
 
 7. The Old Temeraire. 
 
 E 
 
26 
 
 THE HARBOURS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 I know no fourteen pictures by Turner for which these seven might he 
 wisely changed; and in all of* these the shipping is thoroughly principal, 
 and studied from existing ships. A large number of inferior works were, 
 however, also produced by him in imitation of Vandevelde, representing 
 old Dutch shipping; in these the shipping is scattered, scudding and 
 distant, the sea grey and lightly broken. Such pictures are, generally speak¬ 
 ing, among those of least value which he has produced. Two very important 
 ones, however, belong to the imitative school: Lord Ellesmere’s, founded on 
 Vandevelde; and the Dort, at Earnley, on Cuyp. The latter, as founded 
 on the better master, is the better picture, but still possesses few of the true 
 Turner qualities, except his peculiar calmness, in which respect it is unrival¬ 
 led ; and if joined with Lord Yarborough’s Shipwreck, the two may be 
 considered as the principal symbols, in Turner’s early oil paintings, of his two 
 strengths in Terror and Depose. Among his drawings, shipping, as the prin¬ 
 cipal subject, does not always constitute a work of the first class; nor does it 
 so often occur. Eor the difficulty, in a drawing, of getting good colour is so 
 much less, and that of getting good form so much greater, than in oil, that 
 Turner naturally threw his elaborate studies of ship form into oil, and made 
 his noblest work in drawing rich in hues of landscape. Yet the Cowes, 
 Devonport, and Gosport, from the England and Wales (the Saltash 
 is an inferior work), united with two drawings of this series, Portsmouth 
 and Sheerness, and two from Earnley, one of the wreck of an Indiaman, 
 and the other of a ship of the line taking stores, would form a series, 
 not indeed as attractive at first sight as many others, but embracing per¬ 
 haps more of Turner’s peculiar, unexampled, and unapproachable gifts 
 than any other group of drawings which could be selected, the choice being 
 confined to one class of subject. 
 
 I have only to state, in conclusion, that these twelve drawings of the 
 Harbours of England are more representable by engraving than most of 
 his works. Eew parts of them are brilliant in colour ; they were executed 
 chiefly in brown and blue, and with more direct reference to the future 
 engraving than was common with Turner. They are also small in size, 
 generally of the exact dimensions of the plate, and therefore the lines of the 
 compositions are not spoiled by contraction ; while finally, the touch of the 
 painter’s hand upon the wave-surface is far better imitated by mezzotint 
 engraving than by any of the ordinary expedients of line. Take them all in 
 all, they form the most valuable series of marine studies which have as yet 
 
THE HARBOURS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 27 
 
 been published from bis works; and I hope that they may be of some use 
 hereafter in recalling the ordinary aspect of our English seas, at the 
 exact period when the nation had done its utmost in the wooden and 
 woven strength of ships, and had most perfectly fulfilled the old and noble 
 prophecy— 
 
 “ They shall ride 
 Over ocean wide, 
 
 With hempen bridle, and horse of tree.” 
 
 Thomas of Ercildoune . 
 

 
29 
 
 I. DOVER. 
 
 —♦—— 
 
 This port has some right to take precedence of others, as being that 
 assuredly which first exercises the hospitality of England to the majority 
 of strangers who set foot on her shores. I place it first therefore among 
 our present subjects; though the drawing itself, and chiefly on account of 
 its manifestation of Turner’s faulty habit of local exaggeration, deserves 
 no such preeminence. He always painted, not the place itself, hut his 
 impression of it, and this on steady principle; leaving to inferior artists 
 the task of topographical detail; and he was right in this principle, as I have 
 shown elsewhere, when the impression was a genuine one; hut in the 
 present case it is not so. He has lost the real character of Dover Cliffs by 
 making the town at their feet three times lower in proportionate height 
 than it really is; nor is he to he justified in giving the barracks, which 
 appear on the left hand, more the air of a hospice on the top of an 
 Alpine precipice, than of an establishment which, out of Snargate street, 
 can he reached, without drawing breath, by a winding stair of some 170 
 steps; making the slope beside them more like the side of Skiddaw than 
 what it really is, the earthwork of an unimportant battery. 
 
 This design is also remarkable as an instance of that restlessness which 
 was above noticed even in Turner’s least stormy seas. There is nothing 
 tremendous here in scale of wave, hut the whole surface is fretted and 
 disquieted by torturing wind ; an effect which was always increased during 
 the progress of the subjects, by Turner’s habit of scratching out small 
 sparkling lights, in order to make the plate “ bright,” or “ lively.” * In a 
 general way the engravers used to like this, and, as far as they were 
 able, would tempt Turner farther into the practice, which was precisely 
 equivalent to that of supplying the place of healthy and heart-whole 
 cheerfulness by dram-drinking. 
 
 * See the farther explanation of this practice in the notice of the subject oi “ Portsmouth.” 
 
30 
 
 THE HARBOURS OE ENGLAND. 
 
 The two seagulls in the front of the picture were additions of this 
 kind, and are very injurious, confusing* the organization and concealing the 
 power of the sea. The merits of the drawing are, however, still great as a 
 piece of composition. The left-hand side is most interesting, and charac¬ 
 teristic of Turner : no other artist would have put the round pier so 
 exactly under the round cliff. It is under it so accurately, that if the 
 nearlv vertical falling line of that cliff he continued, it strikes the sea-base 
 of the pier to a hair’s breadth. But Turner knew better than any man 
 the value of echo, as well as of contrast,—of repetition, as well as of oppo¬ 
 sition. The round pier repeats the line of the main cliff, and then the 
 sail repeats the diagonal shadow which crosses it, and emerges above it 
 just as the embankment does above the cliff brow. Lower, come the 
 opposing curves in the two boats, the whole forming one group of sequent 
 lines up the whole side of the picture. The rest of the composition 
 is more commonplace than is usual with the great master; but there are 
 beautiful transitions of light and shade between the sails of the little 
 hsliing-boat, the brig behind her, and the cliffs. Note how dexterously the 
 two front sails * of the brig are brought on the top of the white sail of the 
 fishing-boat to help to detach it from the white cliffs. 
 
 * I think I shall be generally more intelligible by explaining what I mean in this way, 
 and run less chance of making myself ridiculous in the eyes of sensible people, than by 
 displaying the very small nautical knowledge I possess. My sailor friends will perhaps be 
 gracious enough to believe that I could call these sails by their right names if I liked. 
 

 
 
* 
 

 31 
 
 II. RAMSGATE. 
 
 -4- 
 
 This, though less attractive, at first sight, than the former plate, is a 
 better example of the master, and far truer and nobler as a piece of 
 thought. The lifting of the brig on the wave is very daring ; just one of 
 the things which is seen in every gale, hut which no other painter than 
 Turner ever represented; and the lurid transparency of the dark sky, and 
 wild expression of wind in the fluttering of the falling sails of the vessel 
 running into the harbour, are as fine as anything of the kind he has 
 done. There is great grace in the drawing of this latter vessel: note 
 the delicate switch forward of her upper mast. 
 
 There is a very singular point connected with the composition of this 
 drawing, proving it (as from internal evidence was most likely) to be a 
 record of a thing actually seen. Three years before the date of this en¬ 
 graving Turner had made a drawing of Ramsgate for the Southern Coast 
 series. That drawing represents the same day , the same moment, and the 
 same ships, from a different point of view. It supposes the spectator placed 
 in a boat some distance out at sea, beyond the fishing-boats on the left in 
 the present plate, and looking towards the town, or into the harbour. The 
 brig, which is near us here, is then, of course, in the distance on the right; 
 the schooner entering the harbour, and, in both plates, lowering her fore¬ 
 topsail, is, of course, seen foreshortened; the fisliing-boats only are a little 
 different in position and set of sail. The sky is precisely the same, only 
 a dark piece of it, which is too far to the right to be included in this view, 
 enters into the wider distance of the other, and the town, of course, 
 becomes a more important object. 
 
 The persistence in one conception furnishes evidence of the very 
 highest imaginative power. On a common mind, what it has seen is so 
 feebly impressed, that it mixes other ideas with it immediately; forgets 
 it—modifies it—adorns it,—does anything but keep hold of it. But when 
 
32 
 
 THE HARBOURS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 Turner had once seen that stormy hour at Ramsgate harbour-mo uth, he 
 never quitted his grasp of it. He had seen the two vessels; one go in, 
 the other out. He could have only seen them at that one moment— from 
 one point; but the impression on his imagination is so strong, that he is 
 able to handle it three years afterwards, as if it were a real thing, and 
 turn it round on the table of his brain, and look at it from the other 
 corner. He will see the brig near, instead of far off: set the whole sea and 
 sky so many points round to the south, and see how they look, so. I never 
 traced power of this kind in any other man. 
 
33 
 
 III. PLYMOUTH. 
 
 The drawing for this plate is one of Turner’s most remarkable, though 
 not most meritorious, works: it contains the brightest rainbow he ever 
 painted, to my knowledge; not the best, hut the most dazzling. It has 
 been much modified in the plate. It is very like one of Turner’s pieces 
 of caprice to introduce a rainbow at all as a principal feature in such 
 a scene; for it is not through the colours of the iris that we generally 
 expect to he shown eighteen-pounder batteries and ninety-gun ships. 
 
 Whether he meant the dark cloud (intensely dark blue in the original 
 drawing), with the sunshine pursuing it hack into distance; and the 
 rainbow, with its base set on a ship of battle, to he together types of war 
 and peace, and of the one as the foundation of the other, I leave it to the 
 reader to decide. My own impression is, that although Turner might 
 have some askance symbolism in his mind, the present design is, like the 
 former one, in many points a simple reminiscence of a seen fact.* 
 
 However, whether reminiscent or symbolic, the design is, to my mind, 
 an exceedingly unsatisfactory one, owing to its total want of principal 
 subject. The fort ceases to be of importance because of the bank and 
 tower in front of it; the ships, necessarily for the effect, hut fatally for 
 themselves, are confused, and incompletely drawn, except the little sloop, 
 which looks paltry and like a toy; and the foreground objects are, for 
 workof Turner, curiously ungraceful and uninteresting. 
 
 It is possible, however, that to some minds the fresh and dewy space of 
 darkness, so animated with latent human power, may give a sensation of 
 great pleasure, and at all events the design is worth study on account of 
 its very strangeness. 
 
 * I have discovered, since this was written, that the design was made from a vigorous and 
 interesting sketch by Mr. S. Cousins, in which the rainbow and most of the ships are already in 
 their places. Turner was, therefore, in this case, as I have found him in several other instances, 
 realizing, not a fact seen by himself, but a fact as he supposed it to have been seen by another. 
 
 F 
 

OK DOST. PUBLISHED MAY 7 a l u l8v56. B Y F,. OAMBAUI So C 4 ? 2 5,BERNERS ST. OXFORD 
 

35 
 
 IY. CATWATEK. 
 
 - ♦- 
 
 I have placed in the middle of the series those pictures which I think 
 least interesting, though the want of interest is owing more to the 
 monotony of their character than to any real deficiency in their subjects. 
 If, after contemplating paintings of arid deserts or glowing sunsets, we had 
 come suddenly upon this breezy entrance to the crowded cove of Plymouth, 
 it would have gladdened our hearts to purpose; hut having already been 
 at sea for some time, there is little in this drawing to produce renewal of 
 pleasurable impression: only one useful thought may be gathered from the 
 very feeling of monotony. At the time when Turner executed these 
 drawings, his portfolios were full of the most magnificent subjects—coast 
 and inland,—gathered from all the noblest scenery of Prance and Italy. 
 He was ready to realize these sketches for any one who would have asked 
 it of him, hut no consistent effort was ever made to call forth his powers; 
 and the only means by which it was thought that the public patronage 
 could be secured for a work of this kind, was by keeping familiar names 
 before the eye, and awakening the so called “patriotic,” hut in reality 
 narrow and selfish, associations belonging to well known towns or watering- 
 places. It is to he hoped, that when a great landscape painter appears 
 among us again, we may know better how to employ him, and set him to 
 paint for us tilings which are less easily seen, and which are somewhat 
 better worth seeing, than the mists of the Catwater, or terraces of 
 Margate. 
 
 T 2 
 
t 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 LCNDOTT, PUBLISHED MAY 7 -? 1856 . BY j; . GAMBARI 8c C? 2S.B7.TORS ST OTFCP ^ 
 
37 
 
 Y. SHEEBNESS. 
 
 I look upon this as one of the noblest sea-pieces which Turner ever 
 produced. It has not his usual fault of over-crowding or over-glitter; the 
 objects in it are few and noble, and the space infinite. The sky is quite one 
 of his best: not violently black, hut full of gloom and power; the complicated 
 roundings of its volumes behind the sloop’s mast, and downwards to the 
 left, have been rendered by the engraver with notable success; and the 
 dim light entering along the horizon, full of rain, behind the ship of war, 
 is true and grand in the highest degree. By comparing it with the 
 extreme darkness of the skies in the Plymouth, Dover, and Bamsgate, the 
 reader will see how much more majesty there is in moderation than in 
 extravagance, and how much more darkness, as far as sky is concerned, 
 there is in grey than in black. It is not that the Plymouth and 
 Dover skies are false, — such impenetrable forms of thunder-cloud are 
 amongst the commonest phenomena of storm; hut they have more of 
 spent flash and past shower in them than the less passionate, hut more 
 truly stormy and threatening, volumes of the sky here. The Plymouth 
 storm will very thoroughly wet the sails, and wash the decks, of the ships 
 at anchor, hut will send nothing to the bottom. Por these pale and lurid 
 masses, there is no saying what evil they may have in their thoughts, 
 or what they may have to answer for before night. The ship of war in 
 the distance is one of many instances of Turner’s dislike to draw complete 
 rigging; and this not only because he chose to give an idea of his ships 
 having seen rough service, and being crippled; hut also because in men- 
 of-war he liked the mass of the hull to he increased in apparent weight 
 and size by want of upper spars. All artists of any rank share this 
 last feeling. Stanfield never makes a careful study of a hull without 
 shaking some or all of its masts out of it first, if possible. See, in 
 the Coast Scenery, Portsmouth harbour, Palmoutli, Hamoaze, and Bye 
 old harbours; and compare, among Turner’s works, the near hulls in 
 
38 
 
 THE HARBOURS OE ENGLAND. 
 
 the Devonport, Saltash, and Castle Upnor, and distance of Gosport. The 
 fact is, partly that the precision of line in the complete spars of a man- 
 of-war is too formal to come well into pictorial arrangements, and partly 
 that the chief glory of a ship of the line is in its aspect of being “ one that 
 hath had losses.” 
 
 The subtle varieties of curve in the drawing of the sails of the near 
 sloop are altogether exquisite; as well as the contrast of her black and 
 glistering side with those sails, and with the sea. Examine the wayward 
 and delicate play of the dancing waves along her flank, and between 
 her and the brig in ballast, plunging slowly before the wind; I have not 
 often seen anything so perfect in fancy, or in execution of engraving. 
 
 The heaving and black buoy in the near sea is one of Turner’s 
 “ echoes,” repeating, with slight change, the head of the sloop with its flash 
 of lustre. The chief aim of this buoy is, however, to give comparative 
 lightness to the shadowed part of the sea, which is, indeed, somewhat 
 overcharged in darkness, and would have been felt to be so, but for this 
 contrasting mass. Hide it with the hand, and this will be immediately 
 felt. There is only one other of Turner’s works which, in its way, can 
 he matched with this drawing, namely, the Mouth of the Humber in 
 the River Scenery. The latter is, on the whole, the finer picture ; but 
 this by much the more interesting in the shipping. 
 

39 
 
 VI. MARGATE. 
 
 —♦— 
 
 This plate is not, at first sight, one of the most striking of the series; 
 but it is very beautiful, and highly characteristic of Turner.* hirst, in its 
 choice of subjects : for it seems very notably capricious in a painter 
 eminently capable of rendering scenes of sublimity and mystery, to devote 
 himself to the delineation of one of the most prosaic of English watering- 
 places—not once or twice, but in a series of elaborate drawings, of which 
 this is the fourth. The first appeared in the Southern Coast series, and 
 was followed by an elaborate drawing on a large scale, with a beau¬ 
 tiful sunrise ; then came another careful and very beautiful drawing in 
 the England and Wales series; and finally this, which is a sort of 
 poetical abstract of the first. Now, if we enumerate the English ports 
 one by one, from Berwick to Whitehaven, round the island, there will 
 hardly be found another so utterly devoid of all picturesque or romantic 
 interest as Margate. Nearly all have some steep eminence of down or 
 cliff, some pretty retiring dingle, some roughness of old harbour or 
 straggling fisher-hamlet, some fragment of castle or abbey on the 
 heights above, capable of becoming a leading point in a picture ; but 
 Margate is simply a mass of modern parades and streets, with a little 
 bit bf chalk cliff, an orderly pier, and some bathing-machines. Turner 
 never conceives it as anything else; and yet for the sake of this simple 
 vision, again and again he quit., all higher thoughts. The beautiful 
 bays of Northern Devon and Cornwall he never painted but once, and 
 that very imperfecCy. The finest subjects of the Southern Coast scries 
 — the Minehead, Clovelly, Ilfracombe, Watchet, East and West Looe, 
 Tintagel, Boscastle — he never touched again; but he repeated Bams- 
 gate, Deal, Dover, and Margate, I know not how often. 
 
 * It was left unfinished at his death, and I would not allow it to be touched afterwards,, 
 desiring that the series should remain as far as possible in an authentic state. 
 
40 
 
 THE HAEBOTTRS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 Whether his desire for popularity, which, in spite of his occasional 
 rough defiances of public opinion, was always great, led him to the selection 
 of those subjects which he thought might meet with most acceptance from 
 a large class of the London public, or whether he had himself more pleasur¬ 
 able associations connected with these places than with others, I know not; 
 hut the fact of the choice itself is a very mournful one, considered with 
 respect to the future interests of art. There is only this one point to he re¬ 
 membered, as tending to lessen our regret, that it is possible Turner might 
 have felt the necessity of compelling himself sometimes to dwell on the 
 most familiar and prosaic scenery, in order to prevent his becoming so much 
 accustomed to that of a higher class as to diminish his enthusiasm in its 
 presence. Into this probability I shall have occasion to examine at greater 
 length hereafter. 
 
 The plate of Margate now before us is nearly as complete a duplicate 
 of the Southern Coast view as the previous plate is of that of Eamsgate; 
 with this difference, that the position of the spectator is here the same, hut 
 the class of ship is altered, though the ship remains precisely in the same 
 spot. A piece of old wreck, which was rather an important object to the 
 left of the other drawing, is here removed. The figures are employed in 
 the same manner in both designs. 
 
 The details of the houses of the town are executed in the original 
 drawing with a precision which adds almost painfully to their natural 
 formality. It is certainly provoking to find the great painter, who often 
 only deigns to bestow on some Rhenish fortress or Trench city, crested 
 with Gothic towers, a few misty and indistinguishable touches of his 
 brush, setting himself to indicate, with unerring toil, every separate 
 square window in the parades, hotels, and circulating libraries of an 
 English bathing-place. 
 
 The whole of the drawing is well executed, and free from fault or 
 affectation, except perhaps in the somewhat confused curlings of the near 
 sea. I had much rather have seen it breaking in the usual straightforward 
 way. The brilliant white of the piece of chalk cliff is evidently one of the 
 principal aims of the composition. In the drawing the sea is throughout 
 of a dark fresh blue, the sky greyish blue, and the grass on the top of 
 the cliffs a little sunburnt, the cliffs fhemselves being left in the almost 
 untouched white of the paper. 
 

 
 
 
 
41 
 
 VII. PORTSMOUTH. 
 
 -4- 
 
 This beautiful drawing is a third recurrence by Turner to his earliest 
 impression of Portsmouth, given in the Southern Coast series. The build¬ 
 ings introduced differ only by a slight turn of the spectator towards the 
 right; the buoy is in the same spot; the man-of-war’s boat nearly so ; the 
 sloop exactly so, but on a different tack; and the man-of-war, which is far 
 off to the left at anchor in the Southern Coast view, is here nearer, and 
 getting up her anchor. 
 
 The idea had previously passed through one phase of greater change, in 
 his drawing of “Gosport” for the England, in which, while the sky of the 
 Southern Coast view was almost cloud for cloud retained, the interest of 
 the distant ships of the line had been divided with a collier brig and a 
 fast-sailing boat. In the present view he returns to his early thought, 
 dwelling, however, now with chief insistance on the ship of the line, which 
 is certainly the most majestic of all that he has introduced in his drawings. 
 
 It is also a very curious instance of that habit of Turner’s before 
 referred to (p. 22.), of never painting a ship quite in good order. On 
 showing this plate the other day to a naval officer, he complained of it, 
 first that “ thes jib * would not be wanted with the wind blowing out of 
 harbour,” and, secondly, that “ a man-of-war would never have her fore¬ 
 top-gallant sail set, and her main and mizen top-gallants furled:—all 
 the men would be on the yards at once.” 
 
 I believe this criticism to be perfectly just, though it has happened to 
 me, very singularly, whenever I have had the opportunity of making com¬ 
 plete inquiry into any technical matter of this kind, respecting which some 
 professional person had blamed Turner, that I have always found, in the 
 end, Turner was right, and the professional critic wrong, owing to some 
 want of allowance for possible accidents, and for necessary modes of 
 
 * The sail seen, edge on, like a white sword, at the head of the ship. 
 
 Gr 
 
42 
 
 THE HARBOURS OE ENGLAND. 
 
 pictorial representation. Still, this cannot he the case in every instance; 
 and supposing my sailor informant to he perfectly right in the present one, 
 the disorderliness of the way in which this ship is represented as setting 
 her sails, gives us farther proof of the imperative instinct in the artist’s 
 mind, refusing to contemplate a ship, even in her proudest moments, hut 
 as in some way over-mastered by the strengths of chance and storm. 
 
 The wave on the left hand beneath the buoy, presents a most inte¬ 
 resting example of the way in which Turner used to spoil his work by 
 retouching. All his truly fine drawings are either done quickly, or at all 
 events straight forward, without alteration: he never, as far as I have 
 examined his works hitherto, altered but to destroy. When he saw a plate 
 look somewhat dead or heavy, as, compared with the drawing, it was almost 
 sure at first to do, he used to scratch out little lights all over it, and make 
 it “sparkling;” a process in which the engravers almost unanimously 
 delighted*, and over the impossibility of which they now mourn, declaring 
 it to be hopeless to engrave after Turner, since he cannot now scratch 
 their plates for them. It is quite true that these small lights were always 
 placed beautifully; and though the plate, after its “touching,” generally 
 looked as if ingeniously salted out of her dredging-box by an artistical 
 cook, the salting was done with a spirit which no one else can now imitate. 
 But the original power of the work was for ever destroyed. If the reader 
 will look carefully beneath the white touches on the left in this sea, he will 
 discern dimly the form of a round nodding hollow breaker. This in the 
 early state of the plate is a gaunt, dark, angry wave, rising at the shoal 
 indicated by the buoy ;—Mr. Lupton has fac-similed with so singular skill 
 the scratches of the penknife by which Turner afterwards disguised this 
 breaker, and spoiled his picture, that the plate in its present state is 
 almost as interesting as the touched proof itself; interesting, however, only 
 as a warning to all artists never to lose hold of their first conception. They 
 may tire even of what is exquisitely right, as they work it out, and their 
 only safety is in the self-denial of calm completion. 
 
 * Not, let me say with all due honour to him, the careful and skilful engraver of these 
 plates, who has been much more tormented than helped by Turner’s alterations. 
 

LONDON: PUBLISHJOD TVTA.Y 7fi , l856 , BY .E.GiMBART & C? P.b, BERNiiRS ST. OXFORD ST. 
 

43 
 
 YIII. FALMOUTH, 
 
 This is one of the most beautiful and best-finished plates of the series, 
 and Turner has taken great pains with the drawing; but it is sadly open to 
 the same charges which were brought against the Dover, of an attempt 
 to reach a false sublimity by magnifying things in themselves insignificant. 
 The fact is that Turner, when he prepared these drawings, had been newly 
 inspired by the scenery of the Continent; and with his mind entirely occupied 
 by the ruined towers of the Rhine, he found himself called upon to return 
 to the formal embrasures and unappalling elevations of English forts and 
 hills. But it was impossible for him to recover the simplicity and narrow¬ 
 ness of conception in which he had executed the drawings of the Southern 
 Coast, or to regain the innocence of delight with which he had once 
 assisted gravely at the drying of clothes over the limekiln at Comb 
 Martin, or pencilled the woodland outlines of the hanks of Dartmouth 
 Cove. In certain fits of prosaic humourism, he would, as we have 
 seen, condemn himself to delineation of the parades of a watering-place; 
 hut the moment he permitted himself to be enthusiastic, vaster ima¬ 
 ginations crowded in upon him : to modify his old conception in the least, 
 was to exaggerate it; the mount of Pendennis is lifted into rivalsliip with 
 Ehrenbreitstein, and hardworked Ealmouth glitters along the distant hay, 
 like the gay magnificence of Resina or Sorrento. 
 
 This effort at sublimity is all the more to be regretted, because it never 
 succeeds completely. Shade, or magnify, or mystify as he may, even Turner 
 cannot make the minute neatness of the English fort appeal to us as 
 forcibly as the remnants of Gothic wall and tower that crown the Con¬ 
 tinental crags; and invest them as he may with smoke or sunbeam, the 
 details of our little mounded hills will not take the rank of cliffs of Alp, 
 or promontories of Apennine ; and we lose the English simplicity, without 
 gaining the Continental nobleness. 
 
 Gr 2 
 
44 
 
 THE HARBOURS OE ENGLAND. 
 
 I have also a prejudice against this picture for being disagreeably 
 noisy. Wherever there is something serious to he done, as in a battle 
 piece, the noise becomes an element of the sublimity; but to have great 
 guns going off in every direction beneath one’s feet on the right, and all 
 round the other side of the castle, and from the deck of the ship of the 
 line, and from the battery far down the cove, and from the fort on the top 
 of the hill, and all for nothing, is to my mind eminently troublesome. 
 
 The drawing of the different wreaths and depths of smoke, and the 
 explosive look of the flash on the right, are, however, very wonderful and 
 peculiarly Turneresque ; the sky is also beautiful in form, and the fore¬ 
 ground, in which we find his old regard for washerwomen has not quite 
 deserted him, singularly skilful. It is curious how formal the whole picture 
 becomes if this figure and the grey stones beside it are hidden with the 
 hand. 
 
r-OTsTDOK. PU BUSHED MAY 7=1856. BY Ji .G-AMBART 8c C? 2 !>.BfcJiNJ, I-..:; ST. OXJ' 
 

 
 
 
45 
 
 IX. SIDMOUTH. 
 
 + 
 
 This drawing has always been interesting to me among Turner’s sea 
 pieces, on account of the noble gathering together of the great wave on the 
 left,—the hack of a breaker, just heaving itself up, and provoking itself into 
 passion, before its leap and roar against the beach. But the enjoyment of 
 these designs is much interfered with by their monotony: it is seriously to 
 be regretted that in all but one the view is taken from the sea; for the 
 spectator is necessarily tired by the perpetual rush and sparkle of water, 
 and ceases to he impressed by it. It would he felt, if this plate were seen 
 alone, that there are few marine paintings in which the weight and heaping 
 of the sea are given so faithfully. 
 
 For the rest it is perhaps more to be regretted that we are kept to our 
 sea-level at Sidmoutli than at any other of the localities illustrated. What 
 claim the pretty little village has to he considered as a port of England, I 
 know not; hut if it was to be so ranked, a far more interesting study 
 of it might have been made from the heights above the town, whence 
 the ranges of dark-red sandstone cliffs stretching to the south-west are 
 singularly hold and varied. The detached fragment of sandstone which 
 forms the principal object in Turner’s view has long ago fallen, and even 
 while it stood could hardly have been worth the honour of so careful 
 illustration. 
 


47 
 
 X. WHITBY. 
 
 —♦— 
 
 As an expression of the general spirit of English coast scenery, this 
 plate must be considered the principal one of the series. Like all the rest, 
 it is a little too grand for its subject; but the exaggerations of space and 
 size are more allowable here than in the others, as partly necessary to 
 convey the feeling of danger conquered by activity and commerce, which 
 characterizes all our northerly Eastern coast. There are cliffs more terrible, 
 and winds more wild, on other shores ; but nowhere else do so many white 
 sails lean against the bleak wind, and glide across the cliff shadows. Nor 
 do I know many other memorials of monastic life so striking as the abbey 
 on that dark headland. We are apt in our journeys through lowland 
 England, to watch with some secret contempt the general pleasantness 
 of the vales in which our abbeys were founded, without taking any 
 pains to inquire into the particular circumstances which directed or com¬ 
 pelled the choice of the monks, and without reflecting that, if the choice 
 were a selfish one, the selfishness is that of the English lowlander turning 
 monk, not that of monacliism; since, if we examine the sites of the Swiss 
 monasteries and convents, we shall always find the snow lying round them 
 in July ; and it must have been cold meditating in these cloisters of St. 
 Hilda’s when the winter wind set from the east. It is long since I was at 
 Whitby, and I am not sure whether Turner is right in giving so mono¬ 
 tonous and severe verticality to the cliff above which the abbey stands; 
 hut I believe it must have some steep places about it, since the tradition 
 which, in nearly all parts of the island where fossil ammonites are found, 
 is sure to be current respecting them, takes quite an original form at 
 Whitby, owing to the steepness of this rock. In general, the saint of the 
 locality has simply turned all the serpents to stone; hut at Whitby, St. 
 Hilda drove them over the cliff, and the serpents, before being petrified, 
 had all their heads broken off by the fall! 
 


 
 
49 
 
 # 
 
 XI. D E A L 
 
 ♦ 
 
 I have had occasion, elsewhere *, to consider at some length, the peculiar 
 love of the English for neatness and minuteness: hut I have only con¬ 
 sidered, without accounting for, or coming to any conclusion about it; 
 and, the more I think of it, the more it puzzles me to understand what there 
 can he in our great national mind which delights to such an extent in 
 brass plates, red bricks, square kerbstones, and fresh green paint, all on 
 the tiniest possible scale. The other day I was dining in a respectable 
 English “ Inn and Posting-house,” not ten miles from London, and, 
 measuring the room after dinner, I found it exactly twice and a quarter the 
 height of my umbrella. It was a highly comfortable room, and associated, 
 in the proper English manner, with outdoor sports and pastimes, by a 
 portrait of Jack Hall, fisherman of Eton, and of Mr. C. Davis on his 
 favourite mare; but why all this hunting and fishing enthusiasm should 
 like to reduce itself, at home, into twice and a quarter the height of an 
 umbrella, I could not in any wise then, nor have I at any other time been 
 able to ascertain. 
 
 Perhaps the town of Deal involves as much of this question in its 
 aspect and reputation, as any other place in Her Majesty’s dominions: or at 
 least it seemed so to me, coming to it as I did, after having been accustomed 
 to the boat-life at Venice, where the heavy craft, massy in build and massy 
 in sail, and disorderly in aquatic economy, reach with their mast-vanes 
 only to the first stories of the huge marble palaces they anchor among. It 
 was very strange to me, after this, knowing that whatever was brave and 
 strong in the English sailor was concentrated in our Deal boatmen, to 
 walk along that trim strip of conventional beach, which the sea itself 
 seems to wash in a methodical manner, one shingle-step at a time; and by 
 
 * Modern Painters, vol. iv. chap. 1. 
 
 H 
 
50 
 
 THE HARBOURS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 its thin toy-like boats, each with its head to sea, at regular intervals, looking 
 like things that one would give a clever boy to play with in a pond, when 
 first he got past petticoats; and the row of lath cots behind, all tidiness 
 and telegraph, looking as if the whole business of the human race on earth 
 was to know what o’clock it was, and when it would be high water,—only 
 some slight weakness in favour of grog being indicated here and there by 
 a hospitable-looking open door, a gay bow-window, and a sign intimating 
 that it is a sailor’s duty to be not only accurate, but “jolly.” 
 
 Turner was always fond of this neat, courageous, benevolent, merry, 
 methodical Deal. He painted it very early, in the Southern Coast series, 
 insisting on one of the tavern windows as the principal subject, with a flash 
 of forked lightning streaming beyond it out at sea like a narrow flag. He 
 has the same association in his mind in the present plate; disorder and 
 distress among the ships on the left, with the boat going out to help them; 
 and the precision of the little town stretching in sunshine along the 
 beach. 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

51 
 
 XII. SCARBOROUGH. 
 
 ♦ 
 
 1 have put this plate last in the series, thinking that the reader will he 
 glad to rest in its morning quietness, after so much tossing among the 
 troubled foam. I said in the course of the introduction, that nothing is 
 so perfectly calm as Turner’s calmness ; and I know very few better exam¬ 
 ples of this calmness than the plate before us, uniting as it does, the glit¬ 
 tering of the morning clouds, and trembling of the sea, with an infinitude 
 of peace in both. There are one or two points of interest in the artifices 
 by which the intense effect of calm is produced. Much is owing, in the 
 first place, to the amount of absolute gloom obtained by the local blackness 
 of the boats on the beach, like a piece of the midnight left unbroken by 
 the dawn. But more is owing to the treatment of the distant harbour 
 mouth. In general, throughout nature, Reflection and Repetition are 
 peaceful things; that is to say, the image of any object, seen in calm water, 
 gives us an impression of quietness, not merely because we know the 
 water must he quiet in order to he reflective ; hut because the fact of the 
 repetition of this form is lulling to us in its monotony, and associated more 
 or less with an idea of quiet succession, or reproduction, in events or things 
 throughout nature : — that one day should he like another day, one town 
 the image of another town, or one history the repetition of another history, 
 being more or. less results of quietness, while dissimilarity and non¬ 
 succession are also, more or less, results of interference and disquietude. 
 And thus, though an echo actually increases the quantity of sound heard, its 
 repetition of the notes or syllables of sound, gives an idea of calmness 
 attainable in no other way; hence the feeling of calm given to a land¬ 
 scape by the notes of the cuckoo. Understanding this,, observe the anxious 
 doubling of every object by a visible echo or shadow throughout this picture. 
 The grandest feature of it is the steep distant cliff; and therefore the 
 
 h 2 
 
52 
 
 THE HARBOURS OF ENGLAND. 
 
 dualism is more marked here than elsewhere; the two promontories or 
 cliffs, and two piers below them, being arranged so that the one looks 
 almost, like the shadow of the other, cast irregularly on mist. In all 
 probability, the more distant pier would in reality, unless it is very greatly 
 higher than the near one, have been lowered by perspective so as not to 
 continue in the same longitudinal line at the top,— but Turner will not 
 have it so; he reduces them to exactly the same level, so that the one 
 looks like the phantom of the other; and so of the cliffs above. 
 
 Then observe, each pier has, just below the head of it, in a vertical 
 line, another important object, one a buoy, and the other a stooping figure. 
 These carry on the double group in the calmest way, obeying the general 
 law of vertical reflection, and throw down two long shadows on the near 
 beach. The intenseness of the parallelism would catch the eye in a moment, 
 but for the lighthouse, which breaks the group and prevents the artifice 
 from being too open. Next come the two heads of boats, with then’ two 
 bowsprits, and the two masts of the one farthest off, all monotonously 
 double, but for the diagonal mast of the nearer one, which again hides the 
 artifice. Next, put your finger over the white central figure, and follow the 
 minor incidents round the beach; first, under the lighthouse, a stick, with 
 its echo below a little to the right; above, a black stone, and its echo to 
 the right; under the white figure, another stick, with its echo to the left; 
 then a starfish*, and a white spot its echo to the left; then a dog, and a 
 basket to double its light; above, a fisherman, and his wife for an echo; 
 above them, two lines of curved shingle; above them, two small black 
 figures; above them, two unfinished ships, and two forked masts; above 
 the forked masts, a house with two gables, and its echo exactly over it in 
 two gables more; next to the right, two fishing-boats with sails down; 
 farther on, two fishing-boats with sails up, each with its little white reflec¬ 
 tion below; then two larger ships, which, lest his trick should be found 
 out, Turner puts a dim third between; then below, two fat colliers, leaning 
 away from each other, and two thinner colliers leaning towards each 
 other; and now at last, having doubled everything all round the beach, 
 he gives one strong single stroke to gather all together, places his solitary 
 central white figure, and the Calm is complete. 
 
 * I have mentioned elsewhere that Turner was fond of this subject of Scarborough, and that 
 there are four drawings of it by him, if not more, under different effects, having this much 
 common to the four, that there is always a starfish on the beach. 
 
SCARBOROUGH. 
 
 53 
 
 It is also to be noticed, that not only the definite repetition has a 
 power of expressing serenity, but even the slight sense of confusion induced 
 by the continual doubling is useful; it makes us feel not well awake, 
 drowsy, and as if we were out too early, and had to rub our eyes yet a 
 little, before we could make out whether there were really two boats 
 or one. 
 
 I do not mean that every means which we may possibly take to enable 
 ourselves to see things double, will be always the most likely to insure the 
 ultimate tranquillity of the scene, neither that any such artifice as this 
 Avould be of avail, without the tender and loving drawing of the things 
 themselves, and of the light that bathes them; nevertheless the highest 
 art is full of these little cunnings, and it is only by the help of them 
 that it can succeed in at all equalling the force of the natural impression. 
 
 One great monotony, that of the successive sigh and vanishing of the 
 slow waves upon the sand, no art can render to us. Perhaps the silence of 
 early light, even on the “ field dew consecrate ” of the grass itself, is not 
 so tender as the lisp of the sweet belled lips of the clear waves in their 
 following patience. We will leave the shore as their silver fringes fade 
 upon it, desiring thus, as far as may be, to remember the sea. We have 
 regarded it perhaps too often as an enemy to be subdued; let us, at least 
 this once, accept from it, and from the soft light beyond the cliffs above, 
 the image of the state of a perfect Human Spirit,— 
 
 “ The memory, like a cloudless air, 
 
 The conscience, like a sea at rest.” 
 
 THE END. 
 
London: 
 
 Printed by Spottiswoode and Co, 
 New-street Square. 
 



 
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