I. OF AGE 253

curious failure of memory-among the many I find-is that I don’t know when I saw my first!¹ I feel as if Mr. Windus’s parlour at Tottenham² had been familiar to me since the dawn of existence in Brunswick Square.

Mr. Godfrey Windus was a retired coachmaker, living in a cheerful little villa, with low rooms on the ground floor opening pleasantly into each other, like a sort of grouped conservatory, between his front and back gardens: their walls beset, but not crowded, with Turner drawings of the England series; while in his portfolio-stands, coming there straight from the publishers of the books they illustrated, were the entire series of the illustrations to Scott, to Byron, to the South Coast, and to Finden’s Bible.

Nobody, in all England, at that time,-and Turner was already sixty,-cared, in the true sense of the word, for Turner, but the retired coachmaker of Tottenham, and I.

Nor, indeed, could the public ever see the drawings, so as to begin to care for them. Mr. Fawkes’s were shut up at Farnley, Sir Peregrine Acland’s,³ perishing of damp in his passages, and Mr. Windus bought all that were made for engravers as soon as the engraver had done with them. The advantage, however, of seeing them all collected at

¹ [The MS. has an additional passage here:-

“All my delighted early study and imitation of him had been of the engravings only, and it is wholly amazing to me to find that there is not, nor has been for years, trace in my mind of the day when first I saw a drawing, any more than of the first story I read in the Arabian Nights, or the first time I read ‘Achilles’ wrath.’ Of Academy pictures, there is no memory whatever in me until the ‘Juliet and her Nurse,’ which I understood then just as well as I do now. But I believe the really first sight must have been the bewildering one of the great collection at Mr. Windus’s-Godfrey Windus of Tottenham-bewilderment repeating itself every time I entered the house, and at last expanding and losing itself in the general knowledge to which it led. Mr. Windus was a retired coachmaker...”]

² [See Vol. III. p. 234 n. An account of a visit to a Mr. Windus’s collection in his “very pretty old-fashioned house on Tottenham Green” may be found in Dr. G. Birkbeck Hill’s Letters of Rossetti to William Allingham, 1897, p. 91.]

³ [Sir Peregrine Palmer Fuller Maitland Acland (1789-1871), of Fairfield, Somerset, second baronet; representative of a junior branch of the Aclands. His only child and heiress married (1849) Sir Alexander Hood. The drawings of Sussex, painted by Turner for J. Fuller, Esq., of Rosehill, Sussex, were sold by Sir Alexander Acland-Hood, Bart., M.P., at Christie’s in March 1908. Ruskin refers to them in a letter to Sir Henry Acland of January 18, 1863 (Vol. XXXVI.).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]