and drawing, in which he was encouraged by Sir George Beaumont, whose mother lived at Dedham and who was himself so fond of art that he usually carried a favourite "Claude " about with him in his carriage when on a journey. The youth was further incited to the same end by a son of the village plumber and glazier, a lad who had the same passionate love of painting from nature as the wealthy miller's son, and the two were frequent companions, sketching and painting in the fields, Constable's father,

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second hand;' but now he resolved to return to Bergholt, where, he says, "I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing the scenes that may employ me. There is room for a natural painter. The great vice of the present age is an attempt to do something beyond the truth."

As with all men whom nature has highly gifted, he had within him strong assurances of success. In 1803 he writes, "I feel more than ever a decided conviction that I shall some day or other

He

against his own judgment, but at the pleadings of his son and the persuasion of others, allowed him to go to London to study art when in his nineteenth year; but in a year or two the miller's confidential clerk dying, young Constable was fetched home to fill his place. had grown now to be a fine young man, and was often spoken of as the "handsome miller." He discharged his duties at the mill faithfully, but his natural bent was too strong to be restrained, and in 1799, when he was twenty-three years old, he left finally his work at the mill, and returning to London was admitted a student at the Royal Academy.

In 1802, when twenty-six years old he exhibited his first picture, a landscape, at the Academy. West, the then president, spoke encouragingly to him. At first, Constable tells us, he tried to paint like his contemporaries, seeking truth at

paint some good pictures, pictures that will be valued by posterity if I do not live to reap the benefit of them." The words were prophetic. His pictures did not take in his lifetime; they were too original and too English to succeed at once. But he persevered, faithful to his own ideas, and to-day he is recognised as the founder of the school of faithful landscape. It has been said of him that "while other painters have made us see nature at a distance or through a window, he alone has planted our feet in her midst. He was the first to paint the greenness and moisture of his native country, the first to paint the noon sunshine with its white light pouring down through the leaves and sparkling in the foliage and in the grass, the first to paint truly the sunshot clouds of a showery sky." Fuseli said, "Constable's pictures make me send for my coat

and my umbrella." Could there be higher testimony to their faithfulness to nature?

There was romance as well as struggle in the painter's life. He had a lady love who warmly reciprocated his affection, but whose relatives opposed the desired match. She was a Miss Bicknell. Her father was solicitor to the Admiralty and afterwards to the Prince Regent. Her grandfather, Dr. Rhudde, rector of East Bergholt, was even more opposed to the match than the lady's father. For five long years the lovers were only allowed to correspond, but throughout them they remained in unchanged faithfulness to each other. By 1815 the artist had

being mothers, had not discouraged the match), and in 1816 Constable's father died. Towards the end of the year the pair married, she being twenty-nine and he forty. They set up their home in London. Three years later Constable was elected an associate of the Royal Academy. He exhibited one of his finest pictures this year, "The White Horse; or, a Scene on the River Stour." His house at this time was full of pictures which found no buyers, and his first considerable tribute of fame came from France. His well known "Hay Wain," now in our National Gallery, was bought by a Frenchman, and exhibited in France, where it attracted

been able to make income enough to be allowed to visit the lady at her father's house in London. The rector of Bergholt was very angry when the engagement was thus recognised, and said, "Maria was no longer his daughter." How strange this opposition seems to us now, when the name of the rector is only preserved from oblivion by his association with the young artist whom he despised, but whose works of genius have given lasting fame to the village of Bergholt! Could Dr. Rhudde revisit his old parish he would not feel disposed to disown his "Maria " for having linked her life with that of Constable. In 1815 both of the lovers lost their mothers (who, likely enough,

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much attention for its freshness naturalness. The King of France sent the painter a gold medal, the first earnest of the fame that was to come. But notwithstanding this beginning of fame, and notwithstanding a legacy of £4,000 left to his wife by Dr. Rhudde, whose enmity relented at last, his income as his family increased was often strained, until the death of his wife's father, who bequeathed to the pair £20,000. This, wrote Constable, "I will settle on my wife and children. And I shall then be able to stand before a six-foot canvas with a mind at ease, thank God." But his rejoicing was short; a greater misfortune than poverty, great as that is,

still

befell him. His wife, who had shared his hopes and toils and aspirations, was taken from him, leaving him and their large family to tread a saddened course till the end came. He worked bravely on, though often suffering from depression, loving his art, and idolising his children. On March 31st, 1837, he worked all day at his picture, "Arundel Mill and Castle"; in the evening he went out on a charitable errand in connection with the Artist's Benevolent Association, of which he was

mother tongue. None of your Latin and French derived words for us. The fair hair and the round comely face of the Saxon are ours too. In no part of England are the youths and maidens comelier to look upon than in Suffolk villages. When we are among them it is easy to understand the feelings which led Gregory at Romesurrounded as he was wont to be with the dark-haired Latin races-to exclaim, "Not Angles but angels,' angels," when he looked upon the comely open countenances of the Anglian lads, who were set

president; at night he was taken ill and died.

Such in brief outline was the career of the great painter.

At Bergholt Constable lived much in the fields among the agricultural population, his companions the agricultural labourers. The quiet peacefulness of their lives he has transferred to his pictures. What are these Suffolk folk like? Like all provincial peoples, the Suffolk folk have their own peculiarities, peculiarities begotten of race, of history, and surroundings. By race we of the Eastern Counties are Angles. The Saxon speech of the Bible and of John Bunyan, of John Bright, and of Charles Spurgeon, is our

And

the

for sale in the market place. maidens, of course it goes without saying, are prettier than the lads. The cottage homes of any of our villages can show girls as fresh and rosy and beautiful as the eye can desire to look upon.

The cottages in which Suffolk folk live are of all degrees of excellence or badness, from the three-bedroomed handsome substantial red-brick modern cottage, with its ample and well-planted garden, on the great estate owned by the man of wealth, to the one-bedroomed clay built thatched cottage of the olden time. a rule rents are only about £4 a year, often less, and are paid yearly at Michaelmas, and the cottager does not

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begin to think about his rent till the harvest begins. Harvests are made large in the Eastern Counties; from £8 to £9 a man in money and malt being a common price in Suffolk for work which, on the average, will be done in a little over or under four weeks, according to the weather. From the extra money earned in harvest, and from the gleaning, and from the fruit trees in the garden, the rent can usually be paid. Gleaning, in my youthful days, was one of the great incomings of the year to the labourer's family. In some parishes no gleaning used to be allowed before the church bell was rung as a signal to begin, the hour being fixed so that the mothers, who had houses and children to care for, might be able to start fair with the single women. A family who worked well would pick up in the harvest two or three sacks of wheat, worth often then 30s. a sack. But gleaning is much less thought of now, partly because the people are better off, partly because corn is cheaper and labour much better paid, and partly because of the introduction of the reaping machines and the

horse rakes of modern times. Within the memory of many of us, when the sickle was still in use, the picture of the reapers and

of the gleaners given in the book of Ruth had its almost exact counterpart in our English fields. The harvest has lost many of its old pleasant characteristics now that the sickle is gone, and gone with it the competition of man with man as they reaped side by side in the field, each carrying his breadth and each trying to get to the end of the field first.

Rare cover did those old reaped stubbles form for game. In them the partridges so plentiful in the Eastern Counties-could find at the same time both food and shelter. Now, when we shave the ground as close as a man's chin, the birds, unless the stubble is very foul with weeds which spring up again after the corn is cut, can hardly hide

themselves when after their food. Then there was as good shooting in the stubbles, and often better, than in the turnips, and as good cover. The old sportsman often longs for the reaped stubbles of his youth back again. In the Eastern Counties game is a sacred thing. In the good times, when farming went well, everything on the great estates was made subservient to it. The plough must not

ON THE BANKS OF THE STOUR.

go too close to the hedges, but good nesting must be left for the birds in the wide rough borders. Tenants were valued in proportion as they cared for the birds, jealous never needlessly to destroy a nest, and labourers were only thought well of as they could be trusted to leave eggs, and nets, and snares, and guns alone. In those halcyon days for landowners there was no difficulty about tenants and rents, the only anxiety on the estate was as to the game. A poacher was the pet aversion of the squire, who, in order to make himself safe against labourers towards poaching inclined, tried to get all the cottages under his own power so that he could clear out of the district any troublesome offender. The labourer likes to see

sport, and some of the class have, as so many of us have, the hunter's instinct strong and unconquerable within them. Being about in the fields at all hours they are always with the game, they have the best opportunities of finding eggs and of knowing the favourite resorts of the birds and the hares. The love of sport and the money value of eggs and game both tempt the men of the fields to poach. The feeling in the villages is that game is not property, but that it is sent for all, and that it is all right to get it, only you should try not to be found out. In every village where there is much game there are those who cannot keep their hands off it, and there are convenient underground channels in all such places for disposing of eggs and birds. Human nature being what it is, how can it be otherwise? Gamekeepers, policemen, and magistrates are looked upon by the villagers more or less as their natural enemies, just as the constabulary and magis

trates are by the people in Ireland, only the things in dispute here are, happily, not near so serious as there. If ordinary cases of poaching were tried before juries taken out of the cottages, it would be as difficult to convict a poacher in Suffolk as it is a man who opposes the landlords in Ireland. The love of sport is natural to man, and confined to no rank of life. No class of rural dwellers were fonder of it in the old times than the parsons. Many are the tales still current of sporting parsons. Here is one. Flights of that mysterious

bird, the woodcock, used to come over the German Ocean to our shores, as they do still but in smaller numbers, and drop to rest for a time on the wild heaths near the coast. A sporting parson in one of these Suffolk parishes was conducting morning service in his church one Sunday, when his servant entered the church and went up the pulpit stairs and whispered to his master, just as he was going to begin his sermon : "Please, sir, the cock are over." The parson cut short his sermon, gave notice that there would not be service in the afternoon, hastened home to get his gun and dog, and sallied forth to beat the heath. The birds were dead tired and lay close, the parson had a good dog and was a good shot, and twenty-four brace of woodcock he bagged before he went home to his Sunday dinner.

In the earlier part of the century, when customs duties were many and very heavy, the number of convenient water-ways on

the coast of Suffolk and Essex made smuggling a common pursuit in the villages. Not a few of the bolder spirits among the labourers took part in that exciting, and then profitable, though sometimes dangerous form of sport. The cargo would be landed in the night at some quiet spot, and stowed away in a convenient sandpit, or barn, or pond, till there was opportunity to get it away. If in a sandpit, a shepherd would very likely have occasion to drive his sheep that way, so as to obliterate wheel marks and other traces -for the whole coast population was more or less in league to evade the customs officers. An old man, who worked for the writer, pointed out a pond in our village, passing which, in the early morning, as he went to feed his horses, the man said he once noticed wheel marks on the grass-there had been a white frost in the night-marks leading down to the pond. His curiosity was roused; what could a cart have been after there? he