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feelings and principles, which I have endeavoured to describe, he undertook the series of “England and Wales,” and in that series introduced the subject of Llanthony Abbey. And behold, he went back to his boy’s sketch and boy’s thought. He kept the very bushes in their places, but brought the fisherman to the other side of the river, and put him, in somewhat less courtly dress, under their shelter, instead of himself. And then he set all his gained strength and new knowledge at work on the well-remembered shower of rain, that had fallen thirty years before, to do it better. The resultant drawing is one of the very noblest of his second period.

51. Another of the drawings of the England series, Ulleswater, is the repetition of one in Mr. Fawkes’s collection,¹ which, by the method of its execution, I should conjecture to have been executed about the year 1808 or 1810: at all events, it is a very quiet drawing of the first period. The lake is quite calm; the western hills in grey shadow, the eastern massed in light; Helvellyn rising like a mist between them, all being mirrored in the calm water. Some thin and slightly evanescent cows are standing in the shallow water in front; a boat floats motionless about a hundred yards from the shore; the foreground is of broken rocks, with some lovely pieces of copse on the right and left.

This was evidently Turner’s record of a quiet evening by the shore of Ulleswater, but it was a feeble one. He could not at that time render the sunset colours: he went back to it, therefore, in the England Series, and painted it again with his new power. The same hills are there, the same shadows, the same cows,-they had stood in his mind, on the same spot, for twenty years,-the same boat, the same rocks, only the copse is cut away-it interfered with the masses of his colour. Some figures are introduced bathing; and what was grey, and feeble gold in the first drawing, becomes purple and burning rose-colour in the last.

¹ [For the “Ulleswater” in the England and Wales, see Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. pp. 490, 541), and vol. iv. ch. xviii. § 12.]

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