Now this fond companying with sailors must have divided his time, it appears to me, pretty equally between Covent Garden and Wapping (allowing for incidental excursions to Chelsea on one side, and Greenwich on the other), which time he would spend pleasantly, but not magnificently, being limited in pocket-money, and leading a kind of “Poor-Jack” life on the river.

In some respects, no life could be better for a lad.  But it was not calculated to make his ear fine to the niceties of language, nor form his moralities on an entirely regular standard.  Picking up his first scraps of vigorous English chiefly at Deptford and in the markets, and his first ideas of female tenderness and beauty among nymphs of the barge and the barrow,—­another boy might, perhaps, have become what people usually term “vulgar.”  But the original make and frame of Turner’s mind being not vulgar, but as nearly as possible a combination of the minds of Keats and Dante, joining capricious waywardness, and intense openness to every fine pleasure of sense, and hot defiance of formal precedent, with a quite infinite tenderness, generosity, and desire of justice and truth—­this kind of mind did not become vulgar, but very tolerant of vulgarity, even fond of it in some forms; and on the outside, visibly infected by it, deeply enough; the curious result, in its combination of elements, being to most people wholly incomprehensible.  It was as if a cable had been woven of blood-crimson silk, and then tarred on the outside.  People handled it, and the tar came off on their hands; red gleams were seen through the black, underneath, at the places where it had been strained.  Was it ochre?—­said the world—­or red lead?

Schooled thus in manners, literature, and general moral principles at Chelsea and Wapping, we have finally to inquire concerning the most important point of all.  We have seen the principal differences between this boy and Giorgione, as respects sight of the beautiful, understanding of poverty, of commerce, and of order of battle; then follows another cause of difference in our training—­not slight,—­the aspect of religion, namely, in the neighbourhood of Covent Garden.  I say the aspect; for that was all the lad could judge by.  Disposed, for the most part, to learn chiefly by his eyes, in this special matter he finds there is really no other way of learning.  His father had taught him “to lay one penny upon another.”  Of mother’s teaching, we hear of none; of parish pastoral teaching, the reader may guess how much.

I chose Giorgione rather than Veronese to help me in carrying out this parallel; because I do not find in Giorgione’s work any of the early Venetian monarchist element.  He seems to me to have belonged more to an abstract contemplative school.  I may be wrong in this; it is no matter;—­suppose it were so, and that he came down to Venice somewhat recusant, or insentient, concerning the usual priestly doctrines of his day,—­how would the Venetian religion, from an outer intellectual standing-point, have looked to him?