ted from the _res angusta_ with
which artists have so often to labour; although, with the characteristic
improvidence of his profession, we still find that he had enough to do to
make both ends meet. Born delicate, he grew up a strong and healthy boy,
and was intended by his father, who had succeeded by purchase or
inheritance to sundry wind and water mills, for a miller. Nay, for about a
year, Constable actually performed that duty at one of his father's mills,
and, it is said, faithfully and assiduously. Yet he contrived to turn even
this episode in his life to some advantage. He treasured up a multitude of
mental studies of clouds and skies, which, to the wind-miller, are always
objects of peculiar interest, and acquired that familiarity with mills and
their adjuncts which justified his brother's observation--"When I look at
a mill painted by John, I see that it will _go round_, which is not always
the case with those by other artists."

Even before his short trial of a miller's life, his love of drawing and
painting had shown itself; but, receiving little countenance from his
father, he had established a little sanctuary of his own in a workshop of
a neighbouring plumber and glazier, John Dunthorne, a man of some
intelligence, and himself an indefatigable artist on an humble scale. His
mother, who seems from the first to have had something like a prophetic
anticipation of his future eminence, procured him an introduction to Sir
George Beaumont, who frequently visited his mother, the dowager Lady
Beaumont, then residing at Dedham. The sight of a beautiful Claude--"The
Hagar"--which Sir George generally carried with him when he travelled, and
of some water-colour drawings by Girtin, which Sir George advised him to
study as examples of truth and breadth, seem to have determined his
wavering resolution to become a painter; and the combined influence of
Claude and Girtin may, indeed, be traced more or less during the whole
course of his practice. His father appeared at last to have given a
reluctant consent, and the mill was abandoned for the painting-room, or
rather for the study of nature in the open air, among the forest glades
and by the still streams of Suffolk.

Suffolk, certainly, might not appear at first sight to be the place which
one would choose for the education of a great painter. Mountains it has
none; to the sublimity arising from lake or precipice, or the desolate
expanse of moor and fell, it has no pret