monument to his memory in connection with it. He purchased a piece of ground at Twickenham, for the purpose of erecting these almshouses twenty years ago, at the time of making his will, designing that this glorious memorial of his genius should be raised amid the beautiful scenery of that locality. The only remarkable circumstance attending the bequest is, that he should exclude water-colour painters from participating in its benefits. His oil pictures, comprising forty to fifty of his finest works, are left to the National Gallery, on condition that, within ten years, a room be set apart exclusively for their reception." That one who for many years lived, and, in a great part, gained his reputation by watercolours, should exclude the professors of that art from any benefit of his will, is curious, and almost to be condemned. He declared that he admired Gritin intensely, yet refrained from purchasing that artist a gravestone.

Turner lived in the honours of the Academy, of which he was a member nearly fifty years; in fact, had he but lived two months longer he would have done so. He was the "Father," or senior member of that body; but Time, which spares none, at length laid hands upon this eccentric genius, who died on the 19th of Dec. of last year, at his lodgings, in Chelsea, whereat he had been living incognito, and known, unless female curiosity had pulled aside the mask, as "Mr. Brooks."

The remains of the great landscape painter were deposited in St. Paul's Cathedral in the month of Dec., 1851, near Sir Joshua Reynolds, and between Barry and Sir Christopher Wren. It was by his own desire that this place was selected, permission being granted by the Dean and Chapter, on the official request of the Royal Academy. Parts of the Service were beautifully chanted by the choir, and Archdeacon Hale, the Canon-Residentiary, presided at the ceremony. The concluding portion of the Service was solemnly and most impressively read in the crypt by the Dean, himself a poet, and one of Turner's warmest admirers. The funeral was attended by all the distinguished Academicians, as well as by numerous friends and amateurs in art. coffin the age of the deceased was marked seventy-nine; the register of his baptism is dated May 14, 1775.

On the

The effect of Turner upon the English school of painters will be less, probably, than a less original painter would have been He was "alone of his own school," like Ben Jonson in position, and could scarcely have disciples, although, perhaps, many imitators may arise. His very eccentricities formed part of his excellence, and none could approach him; yet others may come who will drink inspiration from his paintings, and with a more manageable genius, who may form a school combining the excellences of Turner with the more tangible and comprehensible beauties of Wilson, Lorraine, or Poussin. Yet the deceased artist ranks high, and his fame will increase. In sea-pieces Vandervelde alone equals, but does not surpass him,-nay, in peculiar effects, is decidedly inferior to him. This may be seen in Lord Yarborough's collection, where one of Vandervelde's finest productions is hung as a companion to Turner. A well-known writer on art thus sums up in conclusion:-"He is, beyond question, at the head of our landscape painters,-greater than Wilson, greater than Gainsborough. Contrasted with the great masters of the Continental schools, he will be admitted as worthy to rank with Claude and Poussin, but he is more varied than either; giving, as he does at times, pictures worthy of Cuyp or of Vandervelde,-which Claude or Poussin never attempted to supply."

To his memory, therefore, the memory of one who has enlarged our acquaintance with the beautiful, and has by his representations opened our sympathies with the glorious external forms of the Creator's works, let us be grateful. Born with but one impulse, the artist obeyed it,-worshipped and wrought well;-carrying out, in his intense devotion to Art, the old Latin adage, “Laborare est orare."

J.H.F.

THE OPENING AND THE CLOSING SCENE IN THE LIVES OF CELEBRATED MEN.

THE contrast which so frequently exists between the external circumstances that surround us at the time of our birth, and those which distinguish the closing scenes of life, affords in the case of illustrious individuals, a curious and not uninstructive chapter in the history

stately tombs, we will notice another class, who, having commenced their career in prosperity, closed it amidst the bitterest reverses of fortune. Of these Sir Thomas More is a notable example. His father was a judge on the King's Bench, whose promising boy, born in London, and surrounded by every advantageous circumstance, which could be bestowed by birth, fortune, and education, won the regard of his king, the love of his country, and the veneration of foreign nations, only to close his life on the scaffold, condemned to death by his most ungrateful monarch, for his conscientious adherence to principle. Every one will remember the deplorable termination of life which awaited that early favorite of fortune, the most lovely and unfortunate Mary Stuart, as well as the untimely end of France's wisest King, Henry IV., who was assassinated in his carriage when in the fifty-seventh year of his age. Sir Walter Raleigh, also, the son of a Devonshire farmer, distinguished himself in a prosperous and most romantic career, until he was forced to languish twelve years of his existence in prison; and, after being unjustly condemned to death, was sent out of the country to command a warlike expedition of importance, for which services he not only received no remuneration; but on his return, fifteen years after the sentence of condemnation had been pronounced, he was, "out of compliment to Spain," beheaded in the Tower of London. Little, too, could the humble Pisan mechanic of the 16th century, who perceiving that one of his boys possessed uncommon abilities, strained his own narrow means to send him to the University, foresee that the young Galileo would become one of the world's most celebrated scientific men, and then conclude his famous life blind, deaf, and crippled, under the application of torture in the dungeons of the Inquisition. Born of an ancient family in Nottinghamshire, the fate of the celebrated Archbishop Thomas Cranmer is always interesting, from the character of mingled sweetness, power, and weakness, which strongly enlisting our sympathies, first raised him to the highest station in the Church, and afterwards betrayed him into a false profession of his religious sentiments; expiated in some measure by

the subsequent nobleness of his recantation, and the heroism with which he met a martyr's fate, and expired amidst the flames at Oxford. Cradled in regal pomp, Charles V., at sixteen years of age, succeeded to the kingdoms of Arragon and Castile, then became King of the Romans, and Emperor of Germany, and forty years later gave up the government to his son Philip, and, retiring to a monastery, died, after two years' practice of most un-kingly austerities, in a state of the deepest melancholy, which appears only the fitting retribution for one who had mowed down his subjects by hundreds of thousands in the diabolical game of war. It would be matter of whimsical speculation could we trace the history of all the great men who were bred in a carpenter's shop. Certainly a very large number have sprung from parents engaged in this humble profession, which must ever be a source of sacred interest to all who profess the faith of the carpenter's son. One notable example is that of Hildebrand, the talented son of a carpenter in Tuscany, who was born early in the 11th century. This clever, energetic boy became an inmate of the monastery of Cluny, near Maçon, in France, and in the retirement of its shady gardens, formed, even in boyhood, those vast plans of Church reformation which, amidst the most arduous difficulties, were afterwards carried out when the young monk became Pope Gregory VII. He sustained many

deep discouragements, mingled with brilliant triumphs over his enemies and the Church's guilty errors. But, though feeling on his dying bed that he had sown good seed, whose fruit would appear hereafter, yet, when thus surrounded by his sorrowing bishops, who knew that they should soon see his face no more, he could not help murmuring, "I have loved justice and hated evil, therefore I die in exile." An aged bishop bent over him, and tried to comfort him by replying, "Not so, holy father; you cannot die in exile, for God has given you all nations for a heritage, and the ends of the earth for a dominion;" and while these words were speaking, the carpenter's son expired. His inveterate enemy, Henry IV. of Germany, soon afterwards ended his royal life on a door-step, where he died of cold and hunger,-thus adding

another name to the long list of regal persons whose lives have ended tragically. What a peaceful contrast is presented by the closing scene of the sweetgifted poet Petrarch, whose paternal inheritance, though small indeed, did not prevent his leaving a rich legacy of mental fruits to his country. When seventy-two years of age, wasted as he was by repeated fevers, he still struggled on to acquire knowledge, and to give expression to his own vivid conceptions; and, one July morning, was found dead in his study, seated in his favourite arm-chair, and his head resting on the open pages of a book. Our own peculiarly national poet, Cowper, born of aristocratic parentage, and who spent many of his best days in writing for the cottage homes of England, expired in that clouded state of intellect which seems to us so mysterious, and which at the same time proves immortality so clearly, by showing us how independent are the spirit and its perishable earthly tenement of each other.

It would afford us an instructive chapter in the annals of dying moments, were we able to depict the previous inner life (now imperfectly known) of the many sensitive beings who have gone to their last homes, either without waiting their summons from Him who endowed them with existence, or those who died unconscious of the great change which awaited them, or were hurried to another world by the injustice of their fellow-men, from the eccentric, clever author of the "Tale of a Tub," down to our pure-hearted, single-minded statesman Sir Samuel Romilly. Such a resumé would be full of deep and melancholy interest, but would occupy too much space to be here entered upon, comprising, as it must do," the noble army of the martyrs,"-the victims of secret imprisonment in Spelberg, the Bastile, and other fearful dungeons; and the painful instances of gifted individuals who, like Keats, Chatterton, Toussaint L'Ouverture, and many others, who died under the effects of the less open, but not the less certain, oppression of their fellowcreatures. A few more examples of those great men who have left their broad signature indelibly inscribed on the roll of time, and we must bring these desultory remarks to a conclusion.

Let us look at the two most popular poets in our own country twenty years since one, of high birth, pursued a brief meteoric career, dazzling in its occasional brilliancy, but obscured by sin and the fearful display of noble powers misused for evil, and his fitful light expired in a transient gleam of splendour, when devoting his young but already wasted energies in the cause of Grecian freedom at Missilonghi ; the other mighty minstrel of the north, also lame, though of far less aristocratic descent, passed an almost blameless life of untiring industry, and, after blessing our country with an inexhaustible treasury of high-hearted, invigorating romance, died a greyheaded man in the noble abode which he had himself erected on the banks of the Yarrow; and for long ages to come, will pilgrims continue to visit the two famous shrines of Newstead and Abbotsford. Schoolboys, whose imaginations are inflamed by the romantic incidents with which the lives of the ancient Greeks and Romans are filled, will wonder that we can pass over so rich a store of suitable illustrations to our subject; but they would require a chapter to themselves, though it is with reluctance we omit

all notice of Plutarch's heroes. The very name of this well-known biographer recalls a host of bloody exploits; of Pompey's death-he, beloved by the Romans in his youth, and who embracing his wife, well aware that his end drew near, repeated these lines from Sophocles

Whoever to a tyrant bends his way, Is made a slave, e'en if he goes his freeman. And then stepping into a smaller boat, in order to land on the Egyptian coast, he was murdered by the conspirators, and his ashes were interred in his Alban villa. Then, who does not remember the assassination of Caius Cæsar, by Brutus and others, within the walls of the Senate, and the expiatory decree, after the deed was done, that he should be honoured as a god? And what young student does not dwell with delight on the history of the stern, upright Cato, who, when he had resolved on self-murder, went to bed, and after reading Plato's beautiful dialogue on the soul, calmly put an end to his existence, but a few years before the advent of Him who

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would have taught him how inconsistent was such a close to the life which the God who gave it had alone the right to take away? How we used to revel in the account of the Roman infant, born in a fuller's workshop, to whose nurse a vision appeared, telling her that she was nurturing a great blessing for all Romans; but whose nursling, after a mingled course of weakness, crime, and many good deeds, was murdered on the sea-shore, leaving his discourse on old age, and numerous other writings, to instruct posterity and render his name famous. The Romans seem to have looked upon self-destruction with peculiar satisfaction, for they furnish a singularly large list of complacent executioners in this line. Brutus, by some supposed to be of plebeian parentage, was one of these notorieties, and received a fatal wound by falling upon his sword in the presence of friends who had passed the night with him; but the strangest of the self-immolaters were Antonius and Cleopatra, the former of whom, having lost a battle, and, in despair at the supposed death of his inconstant and beautiful wife, pierced himself with a dagger; and then, finding that Cleopatra still lived, was drawn up to her by women into an upper apartment, where he soon expired, and his example was imitated by his extraordinary wife, who feasted herself on delicacies, and then, decked in diadem and regal robes, allowed an asp to sting her to death. It is difficult to quit the Eternal City when once author or artist has entered within its precincts; yet, ere we leave them, we would reverently advert to the sacred victim of man's injustice, who was sacrificed within its walls only one century later than the barbarian examples just quoted. Born of no mean lineage, how astonished would the proud young Hebrew have felt, had any one prophesied in his youth that, a few years later, a new faith should have arisen, which would no longer single out the Israelites as a peculiar people to be solely honoured by its adoption; and that, in defence of this new creed, he would abjure friends, country, the time-honoured ritual of his native Jerusalem; and, supporting himself by the work of his own hands, would finally lay down his life in the far-famed Roman city, which his exe

cution, by the monster Nero, was thenceforth to render yet more hallowed in the sight of nations.

Of kingly departures to another world, perhaps the most peacefully interesting is that of Louis the Ninth, who was born when hot warfare was raging with the Albigenses, and who, well brought up by his gentle, pious mother, ended his days in the Holy Land, for whose rescue, from the Turks, he believed it to be his sacred duty to fight. On his dying bed he sent messages of affection to other sick persons, wasting under the hot sun of Palestine, and dictated the holiest precepts to his son and successor. He was then, at his own request, laid on a couch of ashes, and the long-expected fleet bringing succour to the plaguestricken crusaders, came in sight, as the truly-pious king breathed his last. A few centuries earlier, but in the same eastern land, a little baby, born, it was declared, amidst the strangest portents in heaven and earth, grew up to found a religious empire, which, even now, exceeds that of the whole Christian race; but who, when the closing scene arrived, was compelled, like other mortals, to supplicate the Omnipotent Father of all for support in the hour of death. He gave orders that his slaves should all be set free, and, with his head resting on the lap of his beloved wife, Ayesha, he exclaimed, in a faint voice, "Oh, Allah, be it so! among the glorious associates in Paradise," and became numbered with the dead. To rightly estimate the sublimity of the death-bed of Ignatius Loyola, would require that his arduous life-time should be well studied; but those who have followed the high-born Spanish page, gallant and warlike through his eventful existence, will enter with awe his Ionely chamber, in the city of Rome, at sunrise, on the 30th of July, 1556, where lay extended the emaciated form of the founder of the great Jesuit sect. His pulse was failing, but his eye retained its vigour; and, as the ministering monks came in, and knelt around their dying superior, the single word "Jesus" escaped his lips, and his spirit passed away. Let us next turn to the naughty little son of a poor watchmaker of Geneva, who afterwards made himself a world-wide reputation, as an author and a disinterested So

cialist, of modern times (no ordinary praise); and the summons having gone forth, he asked his wife to sit beside him, desiring her, at the same time, to open the window; and, looking out at the beautiful green of the fields, he observed, "How pure and beautiful is the sky! There is not a cloud. I trust the Almighty will receive me there above." Dazzled by the brightness of the day, he then fell forward, and, in so doing, expired. Need we say that his name was Jean Jaques Rousseau? He lies buried in an island shaded by poplars, on a small lake in the park of Ermenonville. In the Rue Charles, on the 15th of August, 1769, in the town of Ajaccio, behold a young and handsome woman, the wife of an acute lawyer of a respectable Ghibelline family; she has been to Mass, and, on her hasty return,is resting on a couch covered with tapestry representing the heroes of the Iliad, on which she gives birth to an infant, whose beauty promises to rival her own; and who, hardily educated, grows up in the same retired island, and prepares to follow the profession of arms. Fifty-two years after the birth of this child, we must transport ourselves, in imagination, to another island, far, far away from Corsica, and there, in a secluded chamber, guarded like a prison of importance, by military videttes, we behold the celebrated Corsican whose name has been the watch-word of aggression throughout Europe for at least a score of years. Extreme unction is administered amidst the raging of a tremendous hurricane, which roots up the state-prisoner's favourite willow tree; and, on the 5th of May, the French hero of a hundred battles, muttering "tête d'armée," breathes his last; and, a few days later, is borne to his grave by British grenadiers, his requiem being fitly performed by salvos of artillery over the tomb on the rocky islet, whose faroff seclusion had served to restrain any further outbursts of the fiery spirit which had so long desolated the European world. Twenty-four years after this, the dust of the mighty warrior is lisinterred, and, amidst unbounded enthusiasm, is deposited in the Hotel d'Invallides, on the banks of the Seine.

XANTHUS..

MICHAEL ANGELO.

We trust the period is approaching in which the beauty and dignity of art will be more universally acknowledged and when its influence on the age as an educator, intellectually, morally, and religiously, will be more thoroughly felt and recognised. That such will be the case eventually, we firmly believe; and we could advert to many proofs in confirmation of the fact that an advance is being made in the right direction. We will only allude incidentally to the Great Industrial Exhibition of last year, which, however it may have embodied the more practical and utilitarian tendencies of the time, was yet most emphatically the palace of the beautiful; and, indeed, there is no reason why these two elements (of beauty and of usefulness) should ever be disjoined. We could wish, however, that the love of the beautiful and the artistic were still more widely diffused, and enshrined in the cottages of the poor, as well as in the mansions of the rich. Some may assert that this is an impossibility; but we maintain that where there is a taste for the graceful and the refined, it may always be cultivated, more or less, while the trees wave in the forest solitudes, and the flowers, "earth's stars," smile from the wayside hedges.

But the truth is, that at present the people "care but for few of these things;" and we cannot choose but believe, that it would add greatly to their happiness if they did. It would remove them from the sphere of daily cares, anxieties, and all the distraction and frivolity of ordinary life; or, rather, it would impart a dignity to the more practical duties of existence. The lover of the beautiful is exalted into a brighter region, a land of overflowing delight. He breathes a purer and more celestial atmosphere he has opened to him the portals of a temple exceeding in extent and magnificence the fabled palaces of Eastern enchantment. When going out, faint at heart from the clash of business and intercourse with the cold and unfeeling, he enters at will into fair, green pasture lands, bright with visions of surpassing loveliness, and filled with all the music of heaven.

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And let not the utilitarians be alarmed lest the age become too poetical, too dreamy and imaginative. We