d masterful, he drove everything before him, and
by all sorts of schemes and devices built up a great institution, whose
variety and inequality of composition seemed imaged in the anomalous
structure in which it was temporarily housed. He also, though to the
financial disappointment of many, conferred a great benefit upon the
metropolis by originating the scheme for the erection of the Royal
Albert Hall. He was active in founding the national training schools for
cookery and music, the latter the germ of the Royal College of Music. He
edited the works of his benefactor Peacock; and was in his younger days
largely connected with the press, and the author of many useful
topographical handbooks published under the pseudonym of "Felix
Summerly." He died on the 18th of April 1882.

COLE, THOMAS (1801-1848), American landscape painter, was born at
Bolton-le-Moors, England, on the 1st of February 1801. In 1819 the
family emigrated to America, settling first in Philadelphia and then at
Steubenville, Ohio, where Cole learned the rudiments of his profession
from a wandering portrait painter named Stein. He went about the country
painting portraits, but with little financial success. Removing to New
York (1825), he displayed some landscapes in the window of an
eating-house, where they attracted the attention of the painter Colonel
Trumbull, who sought him out, bought one of his canvases, and found him
patrons. From this time Cole was prosperous. He is best remembered by a
series of pictures consisting of four canvases representing "The Voyage
of Life," and another series of five canvases representing "The Course
of Empire," the latter now in the gallery of the New York Historical
Society. They were allegories, in the taste of the day, and became
exceedingly popular, being reproduced in engravings with great success.
The work, however, was meretricious, the sentiment false, artificial and
conventional, and the artist's genuine fame must rest on his landscapes,
which, though thin in the painting, hard in the handling, and not
infrequently painful in detail, were at least earnest endeavours to
portray the world out of doors as it appeared to the painter; their
failings were the result of Cole's environment and training. He had an
influence on his time and his fellows which was considerable, and with
Durand he may be said to have founded the early school of American
landscape painters. Cole spent the years 1829-1832 and 1841-1842