Exhibited at the Academy in 1839, with the above lines cited in the Catalogue.  Of all Turner’s pictures in the National Gallery this is perhaps the most notable.  For, first it is the last picture he ever painted with perfect power—­the last in which his execution is as firm and faultless as in middle life; the last in which lines requiring exquisite precision, such as those of the masts and yards of shipping, are drawn rightly at once.  When he painted the Temeraire Turner could, if he liked, have painted the Shipwreck or the Ulysses over again; but when he painted the Sun of Venice, though he was able to do different, and in some sort more beautiful things, he could not have done those again.  His period of central power thus begins with the Ulysses and closes with the Temeraire.  The one picture, it will be observed, is of sunrise, the other of sunset.  The one of a ship entering on its voyage, and the other of a ship closing its course for ever.  The one, in all the circumstance of the subject, unconsciously illustrative of his own life in its triumph, the other, in all the circumstances of its subject, unconsciously illustrative of his own life in its decline.  Accurately as the first sets forth his escape to the wild brightness of nature, to reign amidst all her happy spirits, so does the last set forth his returning to die by the shore of the Thames.  And besides having been painted in Turner’s full power, the Temeraire is of all his large pictures the best preserved. Secondly, the subject of the picture is, both particularly and generally, the noblest that in an English National Gallery could be.  The Temeraire was the second ship in Nelson’s line at the Battle of Trafalgar; and this picture is the last of the group which Turner painted to illustrate that central struggle in our national history.  The part played by the Temeraire in the battle will be found detailed below.  And, generally, she is a type of one of England’s chief glories.  It will be always said of us, with unabated reverence, “They built ships of 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, unhelped, 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.  And as the subject was the noblest Turner could have chosen so also was his treatment of it.  Of all pictures of subjects not visibly involving human pain, this is, I believe, the most pathetic that was ever painted.  The utmost pensiveness which can ordinarily be given to a landscape depends on adjuncts of ruin; but no ruin was ever so affecting as this gliding of the