Perhaps, however, the reason his fiancee proved untrue was not through lack of the epistles he wrote her, but on account of them.  In the British Museum I examined several letters written by Turner.  They appeared very much like copy for a Josh Billings Almanac.  Such originality in spelling, punctuation and use of capitals!  It was admirable in its uniqueness.  Turner did not think in words—­he could only think in paint.  But the young lady did not know this, and when a letter came from her homely little lover she was shocked, then she laughed, then she showed these letters to a nice young man who was clerk to a fishmonger and he laughed, then they both laughed.  Then this nice young man and this beautiful young lady became engaged, and they were married at Saint Andrew’s on a lovely May morning.  And they lived happily ever afterward.

Turner was small, and in appearance plain.  Yet he was big enough to paint a big picture, and he was not so homely as to frighten away all beautiful women.  But Philip Gilbert Hamerton tells us, “Fortunate in many things, Turner was lamentably unfortunate in this:  that throughout his whole life he never came under the ennobling and refining influence of a good woman.”

Like Plato, Michelangelo, Sir Isaac Newton and his own Claude Lorraine, he was wedded to his art.  But at sixty-five his genius suddenly burst forth afresh, and his work, Mr. Ruskin says, at that time exceeded in daring brilliancy and in the rich flowering of imagination, anything that he had previously done.  Mr. Ruskin could give no reason, but rumor says, “A woman.”

The one weakness of our hero, that hung to him for life, was the idea that he could write poetry.  The tragedian always thinks he can succeed in comedy; the comedian spends hours in his garret rehearsing tragedy; most preachers have an idea that they could have made a quick fortune in business, and many businessmen are very sure that if they had taken to the pulpit there would now be fewer empty pews.  So the greatest landscape-painter of recent times imagined himself a poet.  Hamerton says that for remarkable specimens of grammar, spelling and construction Turner’s verse would serve well to be given to little boys to correct.

One spot in Turner’s life over which I like to linger is his friendship with Sir Walter Scott.  They collaborated in the production of “Provincial Antiquities,” and spent many happy hours together tramping over Scottish moors and mountains.  Sir Walter lived out his days in happy ignorance concerning the art of painting, and although he liked the society of Turner, he confessed that it was quite beyond his ken why people bought his pictures.

“And as for your books,” said Turner, “the covers of some are certainly very pretty.”

Yet these men took a satisfaction in each other’s society, such as brothers might enjoy, but without either man appreciating the greatness of the other.

Turner’s temperament was audacious, self-centered, self-reliant, eager for success and fame, yet at the same time scorning public opinion—­a paradox often found in the artistic mind of the first class; silent always—­with a bitter silence, disdaining to tell his meaning when the critics could not perceive it.