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 tormented waters of Loch Lomond to the sunlit bay of Barmouth he made all picturesque England his own. Across the frowning abysses of the Alps he came a greater conqueror than Napoleon. He threw off the shackles of classic Italy, and made the shimmering glow of the lagoon and the fairylike flotilla of the gondolas of Venice resume the splendour of their former state. There is no master-hand like that of Turner, and the romantic halo that his worshippers have woven around his memory is deservedly his.

It may readily be understood how great a task is before the collector who sets out to obtain a representative collection of engravings after Turner. The National Gallery has five hundred of his water-colour drawings framed and arranged in a series of rooms in the basement, from elaborate and finished drawings from which the plates for the "Rivers of France" were engraved to hasty sketches in colour, cupolas hanging pendulous in mist, weird skeletons of ship-*wrecked barques beached and striking the note of mysterious tragedy, splashes of crimson set in the foreground with ribs of purple and ultramarine stretched across the sky—inchoate but alive, with intense suggestion of some dream of Nature that Turner snatched in a fleeting moment, and threw on to paper with the mechanical aid of pigments. It requires the seeing eye and the understanding heart of a poet and an artist to interpret these dreams.

The nation became possessed of a hundred oil pictures and about nineteen thousand drawings in water-colour and sketches. But this does not represent all Turner's life's work, and when the fugitive