a kindly, and, as we
believe, an honest testimony to the moral and professional worth of one
whose works stand out with a striking and distinct character in the
English school of landscape-painting, and which, we are confident, will
retain the place which they have slowly gained in public estimation, as
long as a feeling of pictorial truth, in its more elevated sense, and as
distinct from a mere literal imitation of details, shall continue to
endure. Mr Leslie has accomplished his task with skill as well as good
sense; for, keeping the labours of the editor entirely in the background,
he has made Constable his own biographer--the work consisting almost
entirely of extracts from his notes, journals, and correspondence, linked
together by the slenderest thread of narrative. Story indeed, it may be
said, there was none to tell; for, among the proverbially uneventful lives
of artists, that of Constable was perhaps the least eventful. His
birth--his adoption of painting as a profession (for he was originally
destined _pulverem collegisse_ in the drier duties of a miller)--his
marriage, after a long attachment, on which parents had looked frowningly,
but which the lovers, by patient endurance and confidence in each other,
brought to a successful issue--his death, just when he had begun to feel
that the truth and originality of his style were becoming better
appreciated both abroad and at home; these, with the hopes, and fears, and
anxieties for a rising family, which diversify the married life with
alternate joys and sorrows, form, in truth, the only incidents in his
history. The incidents of a painter's life, in fact, are the foundation of
his character, the gradual development to his own mind of the principles
of his art; and with Constable's thoughts and opinions, his habits of
study, the growth of his style--if that term can be applied to the manner
of one whose great anxiety it was to have no distinguishable _style_
whatever--with his manly, frank, affectionate, and somewhat hasty
disposition, with his strong self-reliance, and, as we may sometimes
think, his overweening self-esteem--his strength of mind and his
weaknesses--this volume makes us familiarly acquainted.

Constable was born in 1776, at East Bergholt in Sussex. His father was in
comfortable circumstances, as may be gathered from the fact, that the
artist (one of six children) ultimately inherited L4000 as his share of
the succession. He was thus entirely exemp