Turner found employment enough making water-colour sketches to be engraved for such topographical publications.

But sketches that might be mere hack-work became under his fingers magically lovely.

We may follow him to many a corner of England, Wales, and Scotland, sketching architecture, mountain, moor, mists, and lakes.

His earliest sketches are rather stiff and precise.

But he developed with rapidity, and soon painted them in tones of blue and grey, so soft that the stars and the horizons merge into one lovely indefiniteness.