FORS CLAVIGERA.

FORS CLAVIGERA.LETTER LXIX.I have just been down to Barmouth to see the tenants on the first bit of ground,—noble crystalline rock, I am thankful to say,—possessed by St. George in the island.I find the rain coming through roofs, and the wind through walls, more than I think proper, and have ordered repairs; and for some time to come, the little rents of these cottages will be spent entirely in the bettering of them, or in extending some garden ground, fenced with furze hedge against the west wind by the most ingenious of our tenants.And in connection with this first—however small—beginning under my own eyes of St. George’s work,—(already some repairs had been made by my direction, under the superintendence of the donor of the land, Mrs. Talbot, before I could go to see the place)—I must state again clearly our St. George’s principle of rent. It is taken first as the acknowledgment[276]of the authority of the Society over the land, and in the amount judged by the Master to be just, according to the circumstances of the person and place, for the tenant to pay as a contribution to the funds of the Society. The tenant has no claim to the return of the rent in improvements on his ground or his house; and I order the repairs at Barmouth as part of the Company’s general action, not as return of the rent to the tenant. The reader will thus see that our so-called ‘rents’ are in fact taxes laid on the tenants for the advancement of the work of the Company. And all so-called rents are, in like manner, taxes laid on the labourer for the advancement of the work of his landlord. If that work be beneficial, on the whole, to the estate, and of all who live on it, the rents are on a right footing; but if they are abstracted by the landlord to his own private uses, he is merely another form of the old mediæval Knight of Evilstone, living as hawk in eyrie.It chanced, while I set this work on foot at Barmouth, that a paragraph was sent me out of a Carlisle paper, giving the information that all Lord Lonsdale’s tenants have received notice to quit, that the farms might be re-valued. I requested my correspondent to ascertain for me the manner of the holdings on Lord Lonsdale’s estates;—his reply is the third article in our correspondence this month, and I beg to recommend it to the reader’s most earnest attention. What it says of[277]rents, with the exception indicated in my note, is right; and cannot be more tersely or clearly expressed. What it says of ground-produce is only partially right. To discover another America at our own doors would not be any advantage to us;—nor even to make England bigger. We have no business to want England to be bigger, any more than the world to be bigger. The question is not, forus, how much land God ought to have given us; but to fill the land Hehasgiven us, with the wisest and best inhabitants we can. I could give a plan, if I chose, with great ease, for the maintenance of a greatly increased quantity of inhabitants, on iron scaffolding, by pulverizing our mountains, and strewing the duly pulverized and, by wise medical geology, drugged, materials, over the upper stages; carrying on our present ingenious manufactures in the dark lower stories. But the arrangement, even if it could be at once achieved, would be of no advantage to England.Whereas St. George’s arrangements, which are to take the hills, streams, and fields that God has made for us; to keep them as lovely, pure, and orderly as we can;1to gather their carefully cultivated fruit in due season; and if our children then multiply so that we cannot feed them, to seek other lands to cultivate in like manner,—these arrangements, I repeat, will be found[278]very advantageous indeed, as they always have been; wheresoever even in any minor degree enforced. In some happy countries they have been so, many a long year already; and the following letter from a recent traveller in one of them, may further illustrate the description given in a Fors of early date, of the felicity verily and visibly to be secured by their practice.“Salzburg,July 30, 1876.“Dear Professor Ruskin,—I have long intended to write to you, but the mountain of matters I had to tell you has increased till Pelion is piled upon Ossa within my mind, and so I must confine myself to one or two points. In the Black Forest, and more especially in remote mountain valleys of Tyrol, I have found the people living more or less according to principles laid down for the Company of St. George. I have seen the rules so much decried, and even ridiculed, in England, wrought into the whole life of the people. One may still find villages and communes where lawsuits are impossible—a head-man of their own deciding all disputes; where the simplest honesty and friendliness are all but universal, and the stranger is taken in only in the better sense of the phrase; where the nearest approach to steam power is the avalanche of early summer; where there are no wheeled vehicles, and all burthens are carried on the backs of men and mules,” (my dear friend, I really don’t want people to do without[279]donkey-carts, or pony-chaises; nay, I was entirely delighted at Dolgelly, the other day, to meet a four-in-hand coach—driven by the coachman’s daughter;) “where rich and poor must fare alike on the simple food and cheap but sound wine of the country; where the men still carve wood, and the women spin and weave, during the long hours of winter; and where the folk still take genuine delight in picturesque dress, and daily church-going, and have not reduced both to the dreary felon’s uniform of English respectability. With these unconscious followers of Ruskin, and Companions of St. George, I formed deep friendships; and for me, if I ever revisit the wild recesses of the Œtzthal, it will almost be like going amongst my own people and to my own home. Indeed, wherever I left the beaten track of tourists, and the further I left it, so did the friendliness of my entertainers increase. It was evident they regarded me not as a mere purse-bearing animal, but as an argosy of quite a different sort—a human spirit coming from afar, from a land ‘belonging,’ as one of them conjectured, ‘to Spain,’ and laden with all kinds of new knowledge and strange ideas, of which they would gladly have some share. And so towards the close of a dinner, or supper, the meek-eyed hostess would come and sit beside me, hoping I had enjoyed a ‘happy meal;’ and after a complimentary sip from my glass, ask me all sorts of delightful and simple questions about myself, and my family, and my country.[280]Or the landlord would come sometimes,—alas, at the very beginning of a meal,—and from huge pipe bowl, wonderfully painted with Crucifixion or Madonna, blow clouds of anything but incense smoke. But the intention of honouring and amusing me were none the less apparent.”With my friend’s pleasant days among this wise and happy people, I will forthwith compare the very unpleasant day I spent myself on my journey to Barmouth, among unwise and wretched ones; one incident occurring in it being of extreme significance. I had driven from Brantwood in early morning down the valley of the Crake, and took train first at the Ulverston station, settling myself in the corner of a carriage next the sea, for better prospect thereof. In the other corner was a respectable, stolid, middle-aged man reading his paper.I had left my Coniston lake in dashing ripples under a south wind, thick with rain; but the tide lay smooth and silent along the sands; melancholy in absolute pause of motion, nor ebb nor flow distinguishable;—here and there, among the shelves of grey shore, a little ruffling of their apparent pools marked stray threadings of river-current.At Grange, talking loud, got in two young coxcombs; who reclined themselves on the opposite cushions. One had a thin stick, with which, in a kind of St. Vitus’s dance, partly affectation of nonchalance, partly real fever[281]produced by the intolerable idleness of his mind and body, he rapped on the elbow of his seat, poked at the button-holes of the window strap, and switched his boots, or the air, all the way from Grange to the last station before Carnforth,—he and his friend talking yacht and regatta, listlessly;—the St. Vitus’s, meantime, dancing one expressing his opinion that “the most dangerous thing to do on these lakes was going before the wind.” The respectable man went on reading his paper, without notice of them. None of the three ever looked out of the windows at sea or shore. There was not much to look at, indeed, through the driving, and gradually closer-driven, rain,—except the drifting about of the seagulls, and their quiet dropping into the pools, their wings kept open for an instant till their breasts felt the water well; then closing their petals of white light, like suddenly shut water flowers.The two regatta men got out, in drenching rain, on the coverless platform at the station before Carnforth, and all the rest of us at Carnforth itself, to wait for the up train. The shed on the up-line side, even there, is small, in which a crowd of third-class passengers were packed close by the outside drip. I did not see one, out of some twenty-five or thirty persons, tidily dressed, nor one with a contented and serenely patient look. Lines of care, of mean hardship, of comfortless submission, of gnawing anxiety, or ill-temper, characterized every face.[282]The train came up, and my poor companions were shuffled into it speedily, in heaps. I found an empty first-class carriage for myself: wondering how long universal suffrage would allow itself to be packed away in heaps, for my convenience.At Lancaster, a father and daughter got in; presumably commercial. Father stoutly built and firm-featured, sagacious and cool. The girl hard and common; well dressed, except that her hat was cocked too high on her hair. They both read papers all the way to Warrington. I was not myself employed much better; the incessant rain making the windows a mere wilderness of dirty dribblings; and neither Preston nor Wigan presenting anything lively to behold, I had settled myself to Mrs. Brown on Spelling Bees, (an unusually forced and poor number of Mrs. Brown, by the way).I had to change at Warrington for Chester. The weather bettered a little, while I got a cup of tea and slice of bread in the small refreshment room; contemplating, the while, in front of me, the panels of painted glass on its swinging doors, which represented two troubadours, in broadly striped blue and yellow breeches, purple jackets, and plumed caps; with golden-hilted swords, and enormous lyres. Both had soft curled moustaches, languishing eyes, open mouths, and faultless legs. Meanwhile, lounged at the counter behind me, much bemused in beer, a perfect example of the special type of youthful blackguard now developing generally[283]in England; more or less blackly pulpous and swollen in all the features, and with mingled expression of intense grossness and intense impudence,—half pig, half jackdaw.There got in with me, when the train was ready, a middle-class person of commercial-traveller aspect, who had possessed himself of a ‘Graphic’ from the news-boy; and whom I presently forgot, in examining the country on a line new to me, which became quickly, under gleams of broken sunlight, of extreme interest. Azure-green fields of deep corn; undulations of sandstone hill, with here and there a broken crag at the edge of a cutting; presently the far glittering of the Solway-like sands of Dee, and rounded waves of the Welsh hills on the southern horizon, formed a landscape more fresh and fair than I have seen for many a day, from any great line of English rail. When I looked back to my fellow-traveller, he was sprawling all his length on the cushion of the back seat, with his boots on his ‘Graphic,’—not to save the cushions assuredly, but in the foul modern carelessness of everything which we have ‘done with’ for the moment;—his face clouded with sullen thought, as of a person helplessly in difficulty, and not able to give up thinking how to avoid the unavoidable.In a minute or two more I found myself plunged into the general dissolution and whirlpool of porters, passengers, and crook-boned trucks, running round corners[284]against one’s legs, of the great Chester station. A simply-dressed upper-class girl of sixteen or seventeen, strictly and swiftly piloting her little sister through the populace, was the first human creature I had yet seen, on whom sight could rest without pain. The rest of the crowd was a mere dismal fermentation of the Ignominious.The train to Ruabon was crowded, and I was obliged to get into a carriage with two cadaverous sexagenarian spinsters, who had been keeping the windows up, all but a chink, for fear a drop of rain or breath of south wind should come in, and were breathing the richest compound of products of their own indigestion. Pretending to be anxious about the construction of the train, I got the farther window down, and my body well out of it; then put it only half-way up when the train left, and kept putting my head out without my hat; so as, if possible, to impress my fellow-passengers with the imminence of a collision, which could only be averted by extreme watchfulness on my part. Then requesting, with all the politeness I could muster, to be allowed to move a box with which they had occupied the corner-seat—“that I might sit face to the air”—I got them ashamed to ask that the window might be shut up again; but they huddled away into the opposite corner to make me understand how they suffered from the draught. Presently they got out two bags of blue grapes, and[285]ate away unanimously, availing themselves of my open window to throw out rolled-up pips and skins.General change, to my extreme relief, as to their’s, was again required at Ruabon, effected by a screwing backwards and forwards, for three-quarters of an hour, of carriages which one was expecting every five minutes to get into; and which were puffed and pushed away again the moment one opened a door, with loud calls of ‘Stand back there.’ A group of half a dozen children, from eight to fourteen—the girls all in straw hats, with long hanging scarlet ribands—were more or less pleasant to see meanwhile; and sunshine through the puffs of petulant and cross-purposed steam, promised a pleasant run to Llangollen.I had only the conventional ‘business man with a paper’ for this run; and on his leaving the carriage at Llangollen, was just closing the door, thinking to have both windows at command, when my hand was stayed by the father of a family of four children, who, with their mother and aunt, presently filled the carriage, the children fitting or scrambling in anywhere, with expansive kicks and lively struggles. They belonged to the lower middle-class; the mother an ideal of the worthy commonplace, evidently hard put to it to make both ends meet, and wholly occupied in family concerns; her face fixed in the ignoble gravity of virtuous persons to whom their own troublesome households have become monasteries. The father, slightly[286]more conscious of external things, submitting benevolently to his domestic happiness out on its annual holiday. The children ugly, fidgety, and ill-bred, but not unintelligent,—full of questionings, ‘when’ they were to get here, or there? how many rails there were on the line; which side the station was on, and who was to meet them. In such debate, varied by bodily contortions in every direction, they contrived to pass the half-hour which took us through the vale of Llangollen, past some of the loveliest brook and glen scenery in the world. But neither the man, the woman, nor any one of the children, looked out of the window once, the whole way.They got out at Corwen, leaving me to myself for the run past Bala lake and down the Dolgelly valley; but more sorrowful than of late has been my wont, in the sense of my total isolation from the thoughts and ways of the present English people. For I was perfectly certain that among all the crowd of living creatures whom I had that day seen,—scarlet ribands and all,—there was not one to whom I could have spoken a word on any subject interesting to me, which would have been intelligible to them.But the first broad sum of fact, for the sake of which I have given this diary, is that among certainly not less than some seven or eight hundred people, seen by me in the course of this day, I saw not one happy face, and several hundreds of entirely miserable ones.[287]The second broad sum of fact is, that out of the few,—not happy,—but more or less spirited and complacent faces I saw, among the lower and the mercantile classes, what life or spirit they had depended on a peculiar cock-on-a-dunghill character of impudence, which meant a total inability to conceive any good or lovely thing in this world or any other: and the third sum of fact is, that in this rich England I saw only eight out of eight hundred persons gracefully dressed, and decently mannered. But the particular sign, and prophetic vision of the day, to me, was the man lying with his boots on his ‘Graphic.’ There is a long article in the ‘Monetary Gazette,’ sent me this morning, on the folly of the modern theory that the nation is suffering from ‘over-production.’ The writer is quite correct in his condemnation of the fallacy in question; but it has not occurred to him, nor to any other writer that I know of on such matters, to consider whether we may not possibly be suffering from over-destruction. If you use a given quantity of steam power and human ingenuity to produce your ‘Graphic’ in the morning, and travel from Warrington to Chester with your boots upon it in the afternoon,—Is the net result, production, my dear editor? The net result is labour with wearinessA.M.,—idleness with disgustP.M.,—and nothing to eat next day. And do not think our Warrington friend other than a true type of your modern British employer of industry. The universal British public has[288]no idea of any other use of art, or industry, than he! It reclines everlastingly with its boots on its ‘Graphic.’ ‘To-morrow there will be another,—what use is there in the old?’ Think of the quantity of energy used in the ‘production’ of the daily works of the British press? The first necessity of our lives in the morning,—old rags in the evening! Or the annual works of the British naval architect? The arrow of the Lord’s deliverance in January, and old iron in June! The annual industry of the European soldier,—of the European swindler,—of the European orator,—will you tell me, good Mr. Editor, what it is that they produce? Will you calculate for me, how much of all thatis, they destroy?But even of what we do produce, under some colour or fancy, of service to humanity,—How much of itisof any service to humanity, good Mr. Editor? Here is a little bit of a note bearing on the matter, written last Christmas in a fit of incontrollable provocation at a Christian correspondent’s drawl of the popular sentiment, “living is so very expensive, you know!”Why, of course it is, living as you do, in a saucepan full of steam, with no potatoes in it!Here is the first economical fact I have been trying to teach, these fifteen years; and can’t get it, yet, into the desperate, leathern-skinned, death-helmeted skull of this wretched England—till Jael-Atropos drive it down, through skull and all, into the ground;—that you can’t[289]have bread without corn, nor milk without kine; and that being dragged about the country behind kettles won’t grow corn on it; and speculating in stocks won’t feed mutton on it; and manufacturing steel pens, and scrawling lies with them, won’t clothe your backs or fill your bellies, though you scrawl England as black with ink as you have strewed her black with cinders.Now look here: I am writing in a friend’s house in a lovely bit of pasture country, surrounding what was once a bright bit of purple and golden heath—inlaid as gorse and heather chose to divide their possession of it; and is now a dusty wilderness of unlet fashionable villas, bricks, thistles, and crockery. My friend has a good estate, and lets a large farm; but he can’t have cream to his tea, and has ‘Dorset’ butter.2If he ever gets any of these articles off his own farm, they are brought to him from London, having been carried there that they may pay toll to the railroad company once as they go up, and again as they come down; and have two chances of helping to smash an excursion train.Meantime, at the apothecary’s shop in the village, I can buy, besides drugs,—cigars, and stationery; and among other stationery, the ‘College card,’ of “eighteenusefularticles,”—namely, Bohemian glass ruler, Bohemian glass penholder, pen-box with gilt and diapered lid, pen-wiper[290]with a gilt tin fern leaf for ornament, pencil, india-rubber, and twelve steel pens,—all stitched separately and neatly on the card; and the whole array of them to be bought for sixpence.What times!—what civilization!—what ingenuity!—what cheapness!Yes; but what does it mean? First, that I, who buy the card, can’t get cream to my tea? And secondly, that the unhappy wretches,—Bohemian and other,—glass blowers, iron diggers, pen manufacturers, and the like,—who have made the eighteen useful articles, have sixpence to divide among them for their trouble! What sort of cream havetheyto their tea?But the question of questions about it all, is—Are these eighteen articles ‘useful articles’? For what? Here’s a—nominal—‘pencil’ on our ‘College card.’ But not a collegian, that I know of, wants to draw,—and if he did, he couldn’t draw withthisthing, which isnota pencil, but some sand and coal-dust jammed in a stick. The ‘india-rubber’ also, I perceive, is not india-rubber; but a composition for tearing up the surface of paper,—useful only to filthy blunderers; the nasty glass-handled things, which will break if I drop them, and cut the housemaid’s fingers, I shall instantly turn out of the house; the pens, for which I bought the card, will perhaps be useful to me, because I have, to my much misery, writing to do: butyou, happier animals, who may exist without scratching either paper or your[291]heads,—what is the use of them toyou? (N.B.I couldn’t write a word with one of them, after all.)I must go back to my Warrington friend; for there are more lessons to be received from him. I looked at him, in one sense, not undeferentially. He was, to the extent of his experience, as good a judge of art as I. He knew what his ‘Graphic’ was worth. Pronounced an entirely divine verdict upon it. Put it, beneficently, out of its pictorial pain,—for ever.Do not think that it is so difficult to know good art from bad. The poorest-minded public cannot rest in its bad possessions,—wants them new, and ever new. I have given my readers, who have trusted me, four art-possessions, which I do not fear their wishing to destroy; and it will be a long while before I wish them to get another. I have too long delayed beginning to tell themwhythey are good; and one of my Sheffield men asked Mr. Swan the other day what I had commended the Leucothea for,—“he couldn’t see anything in it.” To whom the first answer must be—Did you expect to, then? My good manufacturing friend, be assured there was no more thought of pleasingyouwhen Leucothea was carved, than of pleasing—Ganymede, when Rosalind was christened. Some day you will come to “like her name.”But, whether you ever come to ‘see anything in it’ or not, be assured that this, and the Lippi, and the Titian, and the Velasquez, are, all four, alike in one[292]quality, which you can respect, even if you do not envy. They are work of men doing their best. And whoseprideis in doing their best and most. You modern British workmen’s pride, I find more and more, is in doing ingeniously the worst, and least, you can.Again: they all four agree in being the work of men trained under true masters, and themselves able to be true masters to others. They belong, therefore, to what are properly called ‘schools’ of art. Whereas your modern British workman recognizes no master; but is, (as the result of his increasing intelligence, according to Mr. Mill,) less and less disposed “to be guided in the way which he should go by any prestige or authority.” The result of which is that every British artist has to find out how to paint as he best can; and usually begins to see his way to it, by the time he is sixty.Thirdly. They belong to schools which, orderly and obedient themselves, understood the law of order in all things. Which is the chief distinction between Art and Rudeness. And the first aim of every great painter, is to express clearly his obedience to the law of Kosmos, Order, or Symmetry.3The onlyperfectwork of the four[293]I have given, the Titian, binds itself by this symmetry most severely. Absolutely straight lines of screen behind the Madonna’s head,—a dark head on one side, a dark head on the other; a child on one side, a child on the other; a veil falling one way on one side, a scroll curling the other way on the other; a group of leaves in the child’s right hand balanced by another in the Madonna’s left; two opposed sprays of leaves on the table, and the whole clasped by a single cherry. In the Lippi, the symmetry is lateral; the Madonna fronting the group of the child central, with supporting angel on each side. In the Leucothea, the diminishing magnitudes of the attendant goddesses on the right are answered by the diminishing magnitudes from the seated goddess and the child, to the smallest figure at her knee, which clasps both the sides of the chain.Lastly, in the Velasquez, the little pyramid of a child, with her three tassels and central brooch, and a chair on each side of her, would have beentoosymmetrical, but for the interferent light in the dog.I said just now, the Titian was the onlyperfectone of the four. Everything there is done with absolute rightness: and you don’t see how. The hair in the Lippi is too stiff,—in the Velasquez, too slight; and one sees that it is drawn in the one, dashed in the other; but by Titian only, ‘painted’—you don’t know how.I say the Titian is the most perfect. It does not[294]follow that it is the best. There are gifts shown in the others, and feelings, which are not in it; and of which the relative worth may be matter of question. For instance, the Lippi, as I told you before, is a painting wrought in real Religion;—that is to say, in the binding of the heart in obedience to the conceived nature and laws of God.The Titian is wrought in what Mr. Harrison calls the Religion of Humanity: but ought more accurately to call, the Religion of Manity, (for the English use of the word ‘humane’ is continually making him confuse benevolence with religion,)—that is to say, in the binding of the heart in obedience to the nature and laws of Man.And, finally, the Velasquez is wrought in the still more developed Modern Religion of Dogity, or obedience of the heart to the nature and laws of Dog; (the lovely little idol, you observe, dominant on velvet throne, as formerly the Madonna). Of which religion, as faithfully held by the brave British Squire, in its widest Catholic form of horse-and-dog-ity, and passionately and tenderly indulged by the devoted British matron in the sectarian limitation of Lapdogity,—there is more to be told than Velasquez taught, or than we can learn, to-day.[295]NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.I. Affairs of the Company.I leave our accounts now wholly in the hands of Mr. Walker and Mr. Rydings, reserving to myself only the usual—as I understand—and proper functions of Director,—that of spending the Company’s money. I have ordered, as above stated, repairs at Barmouth, which will somewhat exceed our rents, I fancy; and a mineral cabinet for the Museum at Sheffield, in which the minerals are to rest, each in its own little cell, on purple, or otherwise fittingly coloured, velvet of the best. Permission to handle and examine them at ease will be eventually given, as a moral and mineralogical prize to the men who attain a certain proficiency in the two sciences of Mineralogy and Behaviour.Our capital, it will be observed, is increased, by honest gift, this month, to the encouraging amount of £16 16s.;—the iniquitous interest, of which our shareholders get none, I have pretty nearly spent in our new land purchase.Cash Account of St. George’s Company.(From June 15th to Aug. 15th, 1876.)1876.Dr.£s.d.June29.To Mrs. Jane Lisle11030.To,,Chas. Firth110Aug.7.To,,G. No. 50.1010012.To,,Miss Sargood220”Miss Christina Allen22015.To,,Balance due Mr. Ruskin14145£311051876.Cr.£s.d.June 16.By Balance due, Mr. Ruskin31105£31105[296]The Union Bank of London (Chancery Lane Branch) in Account with the St. George’s Fund.1876.Dr.£s.d.March15.To Balance1571110May3.To,,Cash Paid Mr. John Ruskin171106.To,,Ditto draft at Bridgwater (J. Talbot)91939.To,,Ditto draft at Douglas (E.Rydings)24189June9.To,,Ditto Cash50013.To,,Ditto, draft at Bridgwater (F. Talbot)20126”To,,Ditto, draft at Bilston (Wilkins)500017.To,,Ditto, Cash2000July6.To,,Dividend on £8000 Consols118100£424341876.Cr.£s.d.July28.By Cheque to Mr. John Ruskin33000Aug.15.To Balance9434£42434II. Affairs of the Master.It was not my fault, but my printers’ (who deserve raps for it), that mine came before the Company’s in last Fors.4It is, I think, now time to state, in general comment on my monotonous account, that the current expenses recorded in the bills of Jackson, Kate, Downs, and David, represent for the most part sums spent for the maintenance or comfort of others; and that I could if need were, for my own part, be utterly at ease in the sunny parlour of a village inn, with no more carriage or coachman than my own limbs,—no more service than a civil traveller’s proper share,—and the blessedness of freedom from responsibility from everything. To which condition, if I ever reduce myself by my extravagance, and, (indeed, just after paying my good Mr. Ellis for[297]thirteenth-century MSS.,5etc., a hundred and forty pounds, I am in treaty to-day with Mr. Quaritch for another, which he says is charged at the very lowest penny at three hundred and twenty)—it will be simply to me only occasion for the loadless traveller’s song; but as it would be greatly inconvenient to other people, I don’t at present intend it. Some day, indeed, perhaps I shall begin to turn a penny by my books. The bills drawn by Mr. Burgess represent now the only loss I incur on them.£s.d.Stated Balance, July 15th617113Repayment and other receipts, July and August406651023178Expenses42750Balance, August 15th£596128£s.d.July16.Geoghegan (blue neckties)400”Naval School55017.David6500”Downs250030.Jackson5000”Kate5000Aug.1.Herne Hill ground-rent230014.Burgess400015.Ellis and White14000”Lucy Tovey (gift)1000”Self (chiefly gone in black quartz from St Gothard Tunnel)1500£42750III.“My dear Sir,—I duly received your very kind note referring to the ‘notice to quit’ to Lord Lonsdale’s farmers in West[298]Cumberland, and have delayed to reply till I had made special inquiries, and find that, as a rule, these tenants have no leases, but have held their farms from year to year only.“Formerly, I am told, some had leases; but as these expired they were not renewed, and the supposition now is that all such have run out, and that all now as yearly tenants have had the notice given them simultaneously.“The notice is clearly given to allow a re-valuation to be made; and when the new rents are arranged, it is expected that leases will then be granted, though it is plain to be seen that all the increased prosperity that the prosperity of recent years of the coal and iron industries have caused to farming,may thus be secured to the landholder; and the farmers, with or without leases, but with higher rents, may be left to bear alone the ebb of the tide that is evidently on the turn; and in any or every case, the general public—the consumers of these farmers’ produce—will have to pay the extra rent, whatever it may be, that Lord Lonsdale may see fit to lay upon the land.6“I have been studying this matter—the increase of land-rents—for many years, and consider it is very much to blame for the present high prices of all land produce, and the distress amongst the poorest of our population, as well as being a great hindrance to the carrying out of any schemes that have for their object the application of more of our own labour to our own soil. In[299]a letter to my son a few weeks ago, I ventured to say that the man who was the first to demonstrate by actual experiment that English soil could be made to double or quadruple its produce, would earn the name of a new Columbus, in that he had discovered another America at our own doors. This son, my oldest, having shown a turn for mathematics, I was induced to send to Cambridge, my hope being that a good education might fit him to solve some of the problems that are so pressing us for solution (and which I had been essaying myself in the pamphlet on ‘Labour and Capital’); and as he now, on the completion of his second term, holds the second place in his year at St. John’s, there is a hope that he may take a good place in the mathematical tripos for 1878; and yet, since we got introduced to your books—two years ago—both he and I think he had best, so soon as he completes his course, go into farming; and hence the reference to growing crops that appeared in his letter last week, and which I am most happy to find has met with your approbation.” (Yes;—and I trust with higher approbation than mine.)IV. The following paragraphs from a county paper gladden me exceedingly, by taking from me all merit of originality in any part of the design of the operations of St. George’s Company, while they prove to the most incredulous not only the practicability, but the assured good of such operations, already, as will be seen, carried to triumphant results on a private gentleman’s estate.The ‘Agricultural Gazette’ gives, as one of a series of papers on “Noteworthy Agriculturists,” a sketch of Mr. William Mackenzie, Achandunie, who, acting for Mr. Matheson, has carried out so many improvements on the Ardross estates. The sketch is in the form of an autobiography, which, as the ‘Gazette’ remarks, carries with it a most pleasant impression of[300]directness and simplicity of character no less than of industry, energy, and success. It is accompanied by a portrait of Mr. Mackenzie, which his friends will recognize as a fair likeness. Mr. Mackenzie states that he was born in 1806, in the parish of Urquhart, Ross-shire, where his ancestors had resided for many generations. His father, who occupied a small farm, died about five years ago at the advanced age of ninety. In 1824, he (Mr. William Mackenzie) entered as an apprentice at Belmaduthy7Gardens, and after serving there three years, removed to the nurseries of Dickson and Co., Edinburgh, where he remained only a few months. He then went to the Duke of Buccleuch’s gardens at Dalkeith, serving under Mr. Macdonald, who was in advance of his time as a practical gardener. There he assisted in carrying out the improvements which were made in the gardens and pleasure-grounds. New ranges of hothouses and a fine conservatory were erected, into which the hot-water system of heating was, it is believed, first introduced in Scotland. Next Mr. Mackenzie assisted in laying out gardens and grounds at Barcaldine, the seat of Sir Duncan Campbell, in Argyllshire; and coming in 1835 to Rosehaugh, as head-gardener, forester, and superintendent of estate works, he carried out the construction of new gardens, both at Rosehaugh and Kinlochluichart, and the remodelling of private grounds and approaches. These large gardens at Barcaldine and Rosehaugh were made with great care,especially in selecting and preparing the soilfor the wall andvineryborders,so that after the lapse, in the one case of thirty years, and in the other of forty years, no decay or canker has appeared among the fruit trees.8[301]“In 1847 Mr. Matheson commenced the improvements at Ardross, the property of Alexander Matheson, Esq., M.P. for the county of Ross.“Ardross proper is surrounded by high hills, and with trifling exceptions was in a state of nature, the whole surface of the district being covered with coarse grass and heather, stunted birches, morass or quagmire, and studded with granite boulders drifted from the hills. The place was under sheep and a few black cattle, and, owing to the coarseness of the herbage the cattle were subject to red water.The tenants’ houses were mere hovels, without chimneys, and with little or no glass in the windows. The population of the district of Ardross proper was, in 1847, only 109 souls; and now, in 1875, the population on the same area is 600, and the number of children attending school is about 140.“In giving a summary of the improvements, we will begin with the pleasure-grounds.9They extend to about 800 acres. In forming them, waggons on rails were used for two years in removing knolls, forming terraces, and filling up gullies. The banks of the river and of the burns flowing through the grounds have been planted with upwards of a hundred different varieties of the finest and hardiest ornamental trees that could be procured, from the tulip-tree to the evergreen oak, and from the native pine to the Wellingtonia. Evergreen shrubs cover about 25 acres in detached portions on the banks of the river which flows immediately beneath the castle, as well as on the banks of two romantic burns, with beautiful cascades, and in ravines. The garden is enclosed with a brick-lined wall, and so boggy was the site that the foundation of the wall is more than 6 feet below[302]the sills of some of the doors. The south side is enclosed by a terrace wall 12 feet high, and the north wall is covered with glass, which includes vineries, conservatory, and orchard houses, besides a range of pits, all heated with water.The soil of the garden was prepared and carted a considerable distance,10as there was none to be got on the site.“Upwards of 5000 acres of moor ground have been planted, chiefly with Scotch fir and larch, the thinnings of which are now being shipped for pit props, the plants of the oldest woods only having been taken out of the nursery in 1847.“The extent of arable land may be best explained by stating that there are twenty-seven farms with thrashing mills, paying rents from £50 to £800 each; and upwards of a hundred ploughs are used in cultivating the lands improved. The steam plough is also to be seen at work on some of the farms.” (St. George does not, however, propose entertaining the curious spectator in this manner.) “Cattle reared on the reclaimed land have taken prizes at the Highland Society’s Shows, and at all local shows; and for cereals and green crops, they will bear a favourable comparison with any part of Scotland.“At one of the detached properties, great care had to be taken, and engineering skill used, in the drainage. Recently a low-lying part of the lands, a mile and a half long by three-quarters broad, was a mixture of the lower stratum of peaty bog, marsh, and spouty sand, charged with ochrey-coloured water, impregnated with sulphur and saltpetre. Attempts made by former occupants to drain this place were fruitless, from want of depth and proper outfall. We found all the pipes in their drains completely choked by deposited ochrey matter. The[303]whole subsoil was running sand. In order to make the drainage perfect, a main leading drain was made, 800 yards long, and in some places 8 feet deep, in which were laid ‘spigot and faucet,’ vitrified pipes 10 to 15 inches in diameter, jointed with cement to prevent sand from getting in, with junctions to receive pipes of smaller sizes, from 10 inches down to 6 inches. Minor drains are from 3½ to 4 feet deep, with tiles of 2 to 4 inch bore, the smaller sizes having collars on the joints. Large stone cisterns are formed to receive the silt, and ventilating shafts with iron gratings are built to give circulation of air. By these means the whole flat is drained effectually,and where bog rushes were the prevailing produce, crops of the richest wheat now grow.The stunted herbage and water were so poisonous that black cattle were known to have turned gray in a season (?).11“More than fifty miles of private roads have been made, and twelve miles of walks through the pleasure-grounds. One walk is six miles continuous, along the windings of fine scenery of the Alness. Upwards of forty miles of stone dykes and eighty of wire fences have been erected, enclosing the arable land and plantations.“For twenty years from three to four hundred men were employed; two hundred of them lived in a square of barracks for nearly eleven years,and so orderly were they that the services of a policeman were never required. There are still a number of men employed, but the improvements are now coming to a close.“All the assistance I had in the engineering and planning was[304]that of a young man only seventeen years old when the works were begun, and we never had occasion to employ a man for a single day re-doing work.“I may further add that I have now the great pleasure of seeing my liberal employer reletting all his farms on the Ardross estate to the same tenants, on a second nineteen years’ lease,” (at increased rents, of course, my friend?) “the second leases having been renewed between two and three years before the expiry of the previous leases, and none of the farms were ever advertised.“I cannot leave this part of the present brief sketch without noticing a feature in the important work so successfully carried out by my enlightened employer, and one which cannot fail to be a source of great satisfaction to himself. Among the first things he did was to establish a school in the district, with a most efficient teacher, and the result is that sons of the small farmers and labourers are now in respectable positions in various walks of life. They are to be found in the capacities of gardeners, artizans, and merchants, students of law, medicine, and divinity. One of them, Donald Ross, carried the Queen’s prize of £100 in the University, and is now one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. Another is the chief constable of the county. Others are in the colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and America, all doing well;and out of hundreds working for themselves, to my knowledge, not one has gone astray.12“I will now advert to the improvements on the west coast estates. A mansion-house was built in the parish of Kintail, with pleasure-grounds and gardens,the former being chiefly reclaimed from the sea. Two islands, which were surrounded by water 11 feet deep on the shore side, are now part of the lawn, the intervening spaces having been filled up by the removal of a hill of rotten rock.[305]This house is let to a shooting tenant. The garden is excellent for fruit, including peaches, nectarines, and apricots, which come to perfection. At Duncraig, recently, a new mansion-house has been built, with all the modern appliances. New gardens have also been made at Duncraig, the site of which was originally a narrow gully running between high ridges of rock. The gardens are upwards of two acres within the walls. The soil is composed of virgin soil and turfy loam, the whole having been carted a considerable distance. The gardens were completed in 1871, and the different kinds of fruit trees, including pears, peaches, and apricots, are now bearing.“Duncraig is rarely to be surpassed in scenery and beauty. The view is extensive, embracing the Cuchullin hills in Skye,” (etc., etc.) “There are two fresh-water lakes within the grounds, one covering thirty-seven acres, and the other about sixty acres, abounding with excellent trout and char. One of them supplies Duncraig House with water, having a fall of about 300 feet. The pipe in its course supplies the gardens; the livery stables and laundry have also connections for applying hose in cases of fire.“The conformation of the ground is a mingling of winding valleys with high rock hills, on which grow natural wood, such as birch, oak, ash, and mountain ash. Several of the valleys have been improved and laid out under permanent pasture, making the landscape, as seen from the front of the house, with wood, rock, and winding grassy bay, very picturesque.“There are twelve miles of private drives and walks—miles of them cut out of the solid rock, and in some places in the face of precipices 100 feet sheer up above the sea. A home-farm is in course of being improved at Achandarroch, a mile south of Duncraig House.”The ‘Gazette’ adds: Mr. Mackenzie himself farms some of the land which he has reclaimed, and nowhere probably is there a better example of what is possible in the way of agricultural improvement under a northern climate. Excellent crops of[306]barley, clover, wheat, and roots are grown where nothing but a marshy wilderness once existed. Here obviously are the circumstances and the experience which should guide and stimulate the efforts of estate owners and improvers in the way of the reclamation of land which is now waste and worthless.“Holme Head, Carlisle,“July 6th, 1875.“Dear Sir,—When I read the number of ‘Fors’ for last April, and came to your account of the rose-leaf cutting bees, I recollected that I had seen one of these bees making its fragmentary cell in a hole in a brick wall, and that I had often seen the remnants of the cut leaves; but I never had a chance of watching them when at work till last week; and thinking the result may be interesting to you, and may correct the omission you refer to at the foot of page 104 in the April ‘Fors,’ I take the liberty to send them to you.“I had the opportunity of seeing a great many bees—often half a dozen together—at work upon a solitary dog-rose in front of a house at a small watering-place (Silloth), and I observed that they cut various shapes at different times. I picked off a great many of the leaves that they had been at, and send you herewith one or two specimens. I find that these have occasionally cut through the midrib of the leaf; but this is a rare exception. I found they carried the cuttings to some adjoining sand-hills, where they had bored small holes in the sand; and in these they built their leaf-cells. The pollen in these cells was not purple, but yellow, and may have been gathered from the Hawkweed which covers the banks where their nests are made.“Since we came home, I have found some more leaves in my own garden similarly cut. The leaves I find to be cut in this way are the rose, French bean, and young laburnum.“Yours truly,“W. Lattimer.”[307]V. Part of a letter from the lady who sent me Helix virgata:—“We live in a poor neighbourhood, and I have come to know the history of many poor working people lately; and I want to understand so much about it, even more than I used to long to understand the mysterious life of shells and flowers. Why aren’t there public baths, etc., for children as much as public schools? They want washing more than teaching. ‘Hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and bodies washed in pure water,’is continually sounding in my ears.” (Well—why don’t you go and wash some, then?)“A poor woman, whose father was a West Country carrier,” (very good, but what isshe?—the gist of the story depends on that: at present it’s like one of those French twisty Bulimi, with no beginning to it,) “was so delighted the other day to find we knew the ‘West Country;’ and when I was saying something about our intending to take the children down in May to pick cowslips, her face gleamed with delight as she said, ‘Oh, the years since I’ve seen a cowslip!’ We used to make ‘tisties’ ” (twisties?) “of them, and it sent a thrill of remembrance through me of my own birthday treats, and cowslip-ball days.“But I’m so glad you like the shells. No, thereisnothing about vegetables in the word Bulimus; but ‘empty-bellied’ generally is hungry, and hungry generally eats a great deal when opportunity offers. Now these ‘Bulimi’ eat a great deal, (ofvegetables, it happens,) so I suppose some one who named them thought they must be very hungry or ‘empty-bellied.’ That’s the way I read the story.” Well, it’s very accommodating and ingenious of you to read it that way; but many snails, thrushes, blackbirds, or old gentlemen of my acquaintance who ‘eat a great deal,’ appear to me more suggestive of the epithet ‘full-’ than ‘empty-’—waist-coated, shall we say?[308]VI. Week’s Diary of a Companion of St. George:—“First day.—Received from Sheffield a dainty ‘well-poised little hammer’ and three sharp-pointed little chisels: felt quite cheerful about porphyry-cutting.“Second day.—Sent to the village in the morning for a slab of freestone; employed man in the afternoon to chisel a hole in it, and to fix the porphyry therein with plaster-of-Paris; drew a straight line, thinking it wiser not to begin with an asterisk; turned the points of two chisels without making the least impression on my line;—the process turned out to be skating, not engraving. Tried the third chisel, and, after diligent efforts, made a cut equal in depth to about two grains of sand. This is the Hamite bondage of art. Felt an increasing desire that the Master should try it, and a respect for the ancient Egyptians. Bore patiently the scoffs of the Amorites.“Third day.—Sent chisel to the village to be hardened. Was recommended a lead hammer. Finally, a friend went to the village and brought back with him an iron hammer and two shorter chisels. Was asked by an Amorite gardener how I was ‘getting on’—unconcealed pleasure on his part to hear that I was not getting on at all. Later, accomplished a beautifully irregular star-fish, which looksmashed outrather thancut, not the least like ‘sharp cliff-edged harbours,’ as the Master kindly supposes. I begin to feel for the ancient Egyptians: they must have got a great deal of porphyry-dust into their eyes. I shall rise in the morning to dulled points and splintered chisels; but ‘whenyou have cut your asterisk, you will know,’ etc., and this is not the voice of a syren, (see ‘Eagle’s Nest,’) but of my honoured Master.… A terrible suspicion occurs to me that he thought no one would or could cut it! Obedience is a fine thing! How it works in the midst of difficulties, dust, and worst of all—doubt!“Fourth day.—I think porphyry-cutting is delightful work: it[309]is true that I have not done any to-day, but I have had my chisels sharpened, and two new ones have arrived from the blacksmith this evening, made out of old files. Also, I have covered my chisels with pretty blue paper, and my hammer with blue-and-white ribbon. I feel the importance of the step gained. Surely I may rest righteously after such labour. If they sing ‘From Egypt lately come,’ in church, I shall think it very personal.“Fifth day.—My piece of porphyry is now enriched by a second star-fish, with a little more backbone in it, and two dividing lines. I worked on the lawn this morning, under thechestnuttree;—the derision of the Amorite gardener (who was mowing the grasswith a scythe) was manifested by the remark ‘Isthat-tall!’ I told him about the Egyptian tombs, but he probably thinks me mildly insane; he however suggested a flat edge instead of a point to a chisel, and I will try it.“Sixth day.—Had lead hammer cast, and waited for chisel.“Seventh day.—With third hammer and seventh chisel will surely charm the porphyry.“But, no! my latest asterisk is jagged in outline instead of sharp. I wonder what attempts others have made. Any one living in or near a blacksmith’s shop would have an advantage, for the chisels are always wanting hardening, or rectifying in some way; and my blue papers soon disappeared. If obedience for the sake of obedience is angelic, I must be an exalted creature. One Amorite’s suggestion was, ‘You would do a deal better with a softer material.’ This was the voice of the tempter.“What is gained?—(besides a lifelong affection for porphyry)—a knowledge of one more thing that I cannotdo; an admiration (to a certain extent) of those who could do it; and a wonder as to what the Master will require next of (amongst others) his faithful and obedient disciple.”[310]VII. Portion of valuable letter from Mr. Sillar:—“Kingswood Lodge, Lee Green, S.E.“August 7th, 1876.“My dear Mr. Ruskin,—It may interest your correspondent, ‘A Reader of Fors,’ and possibly yourself also, to know that interested persons have altered old John Wesley’s rules to suit modern ideas.“Rules of the Methodist Societies (Tyerman’s Life and Times of Wesley, p. 431).“Rule.—Leader to receive once a week what members are willing to give towardsrelief of the poor.“Altered to ‘support of the Gospel.’“Going to lawforbidden, is altered to ‘brothergoing to law withbrother.’“Original Rule.—The giving or taking things on usury, the words have been added, ‘that is, unlawful interest.’“Mr. Tyerman remarks, ‘the curious reader will forgive these trifles.’“I for one do not at all feel disposed to do so.”(Nor does St. George; nor has he either leave, or hope, to say, “God forgive them.”)[311]1Whatcanbe done, ultimately, it is not yet in human imagination to conceive. Whathasbeen done, by one sensible man, for the land he had under control, may be read in the fourth article of our correspondence.↑2Most London theatre-goers will recollect the Butterman’s pity for his son, in “Our Boys,” as he examines the remains of the breakfast in their lodgings.↑3The law of symmetry, however, rests on deeper foundations than that of mere order. It is here, in Greek terms, too subtle to be translated except bit by bit, as we want them.Τίς οὖν δὴ πρᾶξις φίλη καὶ ἀκόλουθος θεῷ; μία καὶ ἕνα λόγον ἔχουσα ἀρχαῖον, ὅτι τῷ μὲν ὀμοίῳ τὸ ὅμοιον ὄντι μετρίῳ φίλον ἂν εἴη, τὰ δ’ ἄμετρα οὔτ’ ἀλλήλοις οὔτε τοῖς ἐμμέτροις.—(Plato, Laws, Book IV.)↑4Note by printer:—“We did this to avoid an unseemly division of balance-sheet, and of two evils thought this the least.”↑5One of these is a perfect English Bible, folio, and in beautiful state, sent to Sheffield for the first volume of our Museum library. Of course I must make St. George a present of it.↑6As I correct this sheet, Fors places another Carlisle paper in my hand; from which I gather that Lord Lonsdale’s conceptions of what is fit, and not, are probably now changed. But my correspondent is wrong inassumingthat the public will have to pay the extra rent. Very probably they will if the farming improvements are fallacious; but if indeed produce can be raised at less expense, the increased rentmayrepresent only the difference between past and present cost of production. In this sense, however, the publicdopay Lord Lonsdale’s extra rent, that their market prices, but for his Lordship, would have been lowered. As matters stand, they may be thankful if they are not raised.↑7I can’t be responsible for these Scotch names. I sent the slip of paper to my printers, and ‘on their eyes be it.’↑8Italics mine (throughout the article, the rest of which is in Mr. Mackenzie’s own words). Have the vine-proprietors of Europe yet begun to look to the Earth—not the air, as the power that fails them? (See noted.)↑9It will, I hope, not be thought an absurdity in the St. George’s Company to retain on their estates ‘pleasure-grounds’ for theirtenants, instead of themselves. In this one respect, and in this only, their public work will differ from this admirable piece of ‘private enterprise.’↑10Supposing the labour of all navvies, gold-diggers, and bad architects, throughout the world during the last fifty years, had been spent entirely in carting soil to where it was wanted for vegetables,—my dinnerless friends, you would have found the difference, by this time!↑11This passage, in capitals, being wholly astounding to me, I venture to put a note of interrogation to it. I have long myself been questioning the farmers in Westmoreland about the quantity of rank bog grass they let grow. Buttheironly idea of improvement is to burn the heather; this being a cheap operation, and dangerous only to their neighbours’ woods. Brantwood was within an ace of becoming Brantashes last summer.↑12The name of the—certainlyveryefficient—teacher of these young people, and the general principles of their tuition, would have been a desirable addition, St. George thinks, to the information furnished by Mr. Mackenzie.↑

FORS CLAVIGERA.LETTER LXIX.I have just been down to Barmouth to see the tenants on the first bit of ground,—noble crystalline rock, I am thankful to say,—possessed by St. George in the island.I find the rain coming through roofs, and the wind through walls, more than I think proper, and have ordered repairs; and for some time to come, the little rents of these cottages will be spent entirely in the bettering of them, or in extending some garden ground, fenced with furze hedge against the west wind by the most ingenious of our tenants.And in connection with this first—however small—beginning under my own eyes of St. George’s work,—(already some repairs had been made by my direction, under the superintendence of the donor of the land, Mrs. Talbot, before I could go to see the place)—I must state again clearly our St. George’s principle of rent. It is taken first as the acknowledgment[276]of the authority of the Society over the land, and in the amount judged by the Master to be just, according to the circumstances of the person and place, for the tenant to pay as a contribution to the funds of the Society. The tenant has no claim to the return of the rent in improvements on his ground or his house; and I order the repairs at Barmouth as part of the Company’s general action, not as return of the rent to the tenant. The reader will thus see that our so-called ‘rents’ are in fact taxes laid on the tenants for the advancement of the work of the Company. And all so-called rents are, in like manner, taxes laid on the labourer for the advancement of the work of his landlord. If that work be beneficial, on the whole, to the estate, and of all who live on it, the rents are on a right footing; but if they are abstracted by the landlord to his own private uses, he is merely another form of the old mediæval Knight of Evilstone, living as hawk in eyrie.It chanced, while I set this work on foot at Barmouth, that a paragraph was sent me out of a Carlisle paper, giving the information that all Lord Lonsdale’s tenants have received notice to quit, that the farms might be re-valued. I requested my correspondent to ascertain for me the manner of the holdings on Lord Lonsdale’s estates;—his reply is the third article in our correspondence this month, and I beg to recommend it to the reader’s most earnest attention. What it says of[277]rents, with the exception indicated in my note, is right; and cannot be more tersely or clearly expressed. What it says of ground-produce is only partially right. To discover another America at our own doors would not be any advantage to us;—nor even to make England bigger. We have no business to want England to be bigger, any more than the world to be bigger. The question is not, forus, how much land God ought to have given us; but to fill the land Hehasgiven us, with the wisest and best inhabitants we can. I could give a plan, if I chose, with great ease, for the maintenance of a greatly increased quantity of inhabitants, on iron scaffolding, by pulverizing our mountains, and strewing the duly pulverized and, by wise medical geology, drugged, materials, over the upper stages; carrying on our present ingenious manufactures in the dark lower stories. But the arrangement, even if it could be at once achieved, would be of no advantage to England.Whereas St. George’s arrangements, which are to take the hills, streams, and fields that God has made for us; to keep them as lovely, pure, and orderly as we can;1to gather their carefully cultivated fruit in due season; and if our children then multiply so that we cannot feed them, to seek other lands to cultivate in like manner,—these arrangements, I repeat, will be found[278]very advantageous indeed, as they always have been; wheresoever even in any minor degree enforced. In some happy countries they have been so, many a long year already; and the following letter from a recent traveller in one of them, may further illustrate the description given in a Fors of early date, of the felicity verily and visibly to be secured by their practice.“Salzburg,July 30, 1876.“Dear Professor Ruskin,—I have long intended to write to you, but the mountain of matters I had to tell you has increased till Pelion is piled upon Ossa within my mind, and so I must confine myself to one or two points. In the Black Forest, and more especially in remote mountain valleys of Tyrol, I have found the people living more or less according to principles laid down for the Company of St. George. I have seen the rules so much decried, and even ridiculed, in England, wrought into the whole life of the people. One may still find villages and communes where lawsuits are impossible—a head-man of their own deciding all disputes; where the simplest honesty and friendliness are all but universal, and the stranger is taken in only in the better sense of the phrase; where the nearest approach to steam power is the avalanche of early summer; where there are no wheeled vehicles, and all burthens are carried on the backs of men and mules,” (my dear friend, I really don’t want people to do without[279]donkey-carts, or pony-chaises; nay, I was entirely delighted at Dolgelly, the other day, to meet a four-in-hand coach—driven by the coachman’s daughter;) “where rich and poor must fare alike on the simple food and cheap but sound wine of the country; where the men still carve wood, and the women spin and weave, during the long hours of winter; and where the folk still take genuine delight in picturesque dress, and daily church-going, and have not reduced both to the dreary felon’s uniform of English respectability. With these unconscious followers of Ruskin, and Companions of St. George, I formed deep friendships; and for me, if I ever revisit the wild recesses of the Œtzthal, it will almost be like going amongst my own people and to my own home. Indeed, wherever I left the beaten track of tourists, and the further I left it, so did the friendliness of my entertainers increase. It was evident they regarded me not as a mere purse-bearing animal, but as an argosy of quite a different sort—a human spirit coming from afar, from a land ‘belonging,’ as one of them conjectured, ‘to Spain,’ and laden with all kinds of new knowledge and strange ideas, of which they would gladly have some share. And so towards the close of a dinner, or supper, the meek-eyed hostess would come and sit beside me, hoping I had enjoyed a ‘happy meal;’ and after a complimentary sip from my glass, ask me all sorts of delightful and simple questions about myself, and my family, and my country.[280]Or the landlord would come sometimes,—alas, at the very beginning of a meal,—and from huge pipe bowl, wonderfully painted with Crucifixion or Madonna, blow clouds of anything but incense smoke. But the intention of honouring and amusing me were none the less apparent.”With my friend’s pleasant days among this wise and happy people, I will forthwith compare the very unpleasant day I spent myself on my journey to Barmouth, among unwise and wretched ones; one incident occurring in it being of extreme significance. I had driven from Brantwood in early morning down the valley of the Crake, and took train first at the Ulverston station, settling myself in the corner of a carriage next the sea, for better prospect thereof. In the other corner was a respectable, stolid, middle-aged man reading his paper.I had left my Coniston lake in dashing ripples under a south wind, thick with rain; but the tide lay smooth and silent along the sands; melancholy in absolute pause of motion, nor ebb nor flow distinguishable;—here and there, among the shelves of grey shore, a little ruffling of their apparent pools marked stray threadings of river-current.At Grange, talking loud, got in two young coxcombs; who reclined themselves on the opposite cushions. One had a thin stick, with which, in a kind of St. Vitus’s dance, partly affectation of nonchalance, partly real fever[281]produced by the intolerable idleness of his mind and body, he rapped on the elbow of his seat, poked at the button-holes of the window strap, and switched his boots, or the air, all the way from Grange to the last station before Carnforth,—he and his friend talking yacht and regatta, listlessly;—the St. Vitus’s, meantime, dancing one expressing his opinion that “the most dangerous thing to do on these lakes was going before the wind.” The respectable man went on reading his paper, without notice of them. None of the three ever looked out of the windows at sea or shore. There was not much to look at, indeed, through the driving, and gradually closer-driven, rain,—except the drifting about of the seagulls, and their quiet dropping into the pools, their wings kept open for an instant till their breasts felt the water well; then closing their petals of white light, like suddenly shut water flowers.The two regatta men got out, in drenching rain, on the coverless platform at the station before Carnforth, and all the rest of us at Carnforth itself, to wait for the up train. The shed on the up-line side, even there, is small, in which a crowd of third-class passengers were packed close by the outside drip. I did not see one, out of some twenty-five or thirty persons, tidily dressed, nor one with a contented and serenely patient look. Lines of care, of mean hardship, of comfortless submission, of gnawing anxiety, or ill-temper, characterized every face.[282]The train came up, and my poor companions were shuffled into it speedily, in heaps. I found an empty first-class carriage for myself: wondering how long universal suffrage would allow itself to be packed away in heaps, for my convenience.At Lancaster, a father and daughter got in; presumably commercial. Father stoutly built and firm-featured, sagacious and cool. The girl hard and common; well dressed, except that her hat was cocked too high on her hair. They both read papers all the way to Warrington. I was not myself employed much better; the incessant rain making the windows a mere wilderness of dirty dribblings; and neither Preston nor Wigan presenting anything lively to behold, I had settled myself to Mrs. Brown on Spelling Bees, (an unusually forced and poor number of Mrs. Brown, by the way).I had to change at Warrington for Chester. The weather bettered a little, while I got a cup of tea and slice of bread in the small refreshment room; contemplating, the while, in front of me, the panels of painted glass on its swinging doors, which represented two troubadours, in broadly striped blue and yellow breeches, purple jackets, and plumed caps; with golden-hilted swords, and enormous lyres. Both had soft curled moustaches, languishing eyes, open mouths, and faultless legs. Meanwhile, lounged at the counter behind me, much bemused in beer, a perfect example of the special type of youthful blackguard now developing generally[283]in England; more or less blackly pulpous and swollen in all the features, and with mingled expression of intense grossness and intense impudence,—half pig, half jackdaw.There got in with me, when the train was ready, a middle-class person of commercial-traveller aspect, who had possessed himself of a ‘Graphic’ from the news-boy; and whom I presently forgot, in examining the country on a line new to me, which became quickly, under gleams of broken sunlight, of extreme interest. Azure-green fields of deep corn; undulations of sandstone hill, with here and there a broken crag at the edge of a cutting; presently the far glittering of the Solway-like sands of Dee, and rounded waves of the Welsh hills on the southern horizon, formed a landscape more fresh and fair than I have seen for many a day, from any great line of English rail. When I looked back to my fellow-traveller, he was sprawling all his length on the cushion of the back seat, with his boots on his ‘Graphic,’—not to save the cushions assuredly, but in the foul modern carelessness of everything which we have ‘done with’ for the moment;—his face clouded with sullen thought, as of a person helplessly in difficulty, and not able to give up thinking how to avoid the unavoidable.In a minute or two more I found myself plunged into the general dissolution and whirlpool of porters, passengers, and crook-boned trucks, running round corners[284]against one’s legs, of the great Chester station. A simply-dressed upper-class girl of sixteen or seventeen, strictly and swiftly piloting her little sister through the populace, was the first human creature I had yet seen, on whom sight could rest without pain. The rest of the crowd was a mere dismal fermentation of the Ignominious.The train to Ruabon was crowded, and I was obliged to get into a carriage with two cadaverous sexagenarian spinsters, who had been keeping the windows up, all but a chink, for fear a drop of rain or breath of south wind should come in, and were breathing the richest compound of products of their own indigestion. Pretending to be anxious about the construction of the train, I got the farther window down, and my body well out of it; then put it only half-way up when the train left, and kept putting my head out without my hat; so as, if possible, to impress my fellow-passengers with the imminence of a collision, which could only be averted by extreme watchfulness on my part. Then requesting, with all the politeness I could muster, to be allowed to move a box with which they had occupied the corner-seat—“that I might sit face to the air”—I got them ashamed to ask that the window might be shut up again; but they huddled away into the opposite corner to make me understand how they suffered from the draught. Presently they got out two bags of blue grapes, and[285]ate away unanimously, availing themselves of my open window to throw out rolled-up pips and skins.General change, to my extreme relief, as to their’s, was again required at Ruabon, effected by a screwing backwards and forwards, for three-quarters of an hour, of carriages which one was expecting every five minutes to get into; and which were puffed and pushed away again the moment one opened a door, with loud calls of ‘Stand back there.’ A group of half a dozen children, from eight to fourteen—the girls all in straw hats, with long hanging scarlet ribands—were more or less pleasant to see meanwhile; and sunshine through the puffs of petulant and cross-purposed steam, promised a pleasant run to Llangollen.I had only the conventional ‘business man with a paper’ for this run; and on his leaving the carriage at Llangollen, was just closing the door, thinking to have both windows at command, when my hand was stayed by the father of a family of four children, who, with their mother and aunt, presently filled the carriage, the children fitting or scrambling in anywhere, with expansive kicks and lively struggles. They belonged to the lower middle-class; the mother an ideal of the worthy commonplace, evidently hard put to it to make both ends meet, and wholly occupied in family concerns; her face fixed in the ignoble gravity of virtuous persons to whom their own troublesome households have become monasteries. The father, slightly[286]more conscious of external things, submitting benevolently to his domestic happiness out on its annual holiday. The children ugly, fidgety, and ill-bred, but not unintelligent,—full of questionings, ‘when’ they were to get here, or there? how many rails there were on the line; which side the station was on, and who was to meet them. In such debate, varied by bodily contortions in every direction, they contrived to pass the half-hour which took us through the vale of Llangollen, past some of the loveliest brook and glen scenery in the world. But neither the man, the woman, nor any one of the children, looked out of the window once, the whole way.They got out at Corwen, leaving me to myself for the run past Bala lake and down the Dolgelly valley; but more sorrowful than of late has been my wont, in the sense of my total isolation from the thoughts and ways of the present English people. For I was perfectly certain that among all the crowd of living creatures whom I had that day seen,—scarlet ribands and all,—there was not one to whom I could have spoken a word on any subject interesting to me, which would have been intelligible to them.But the first broad sum of fact, for the sake of which I have given this diary, is that among certainly not less than some seven or eight hundred people, seen by me in the course of this day, I saw not one happy face, and several hundreds of entirely miserable ones.[287]The second broad sum of fact is, that out of the few,—not happy,—but more or less spirited and complacent faces I saw, among the lower and the mercantile classes, what life or spirit they had depended on a peculiar cock-on-a-dunghill character of impudence, which meant a total inability to conceive any good or lovely thing in this world or any other: and the third sum of fact is, that in this rich England I saw only eight out of eight hundred persons gracefully dressed, and decently mannered. But the particular sign, and prophetic vision of the day, to me, was the man lying with his boots on his ‘Graphic.’ There is a long article in the ‘Monetary Gazette,’ sent me this morning, on the folly of the modern theory that the nation is suffering from ‘over-production.’ The writer is quite correct in his condemnation of the fallacy in question; but it has not occurred to him, nor to any other writer that I know of on such matters, to consider whether we may not possibly be suffering from over-destruction. If you use a given quantity of steam power and human ingenuity to produce your ‘Graphic’ in the morning, and travel from Warrington to Chester with your boots upon it in the afternoon,—Is the net result, production, my dear editor? The net result is labour with wearinessA.M.,—idleness with disgustP.M.,—and nothing to eat next day. And do not think our Warrington friend other than a true type of your modern British employer of industry. The universal British public has[288]no idea of any other use of art, or industry, than he! It reclines everlastingly with its boots on its ‘Graphic.’ ‘To-morrow there will be another,—what use is there in the old?’ Think of the quantity of energy used in the ‘production’ of the daily works of the British press? The first necessity of our lives in the morning,—old rags in the evening! Or the annual works of the British naval architect? The arrow of the Lord’s deliverance in January, and old iron in June! The annual industry of the European soldier,—of the European swindler,—of the European orator,—will you tell me, good Mr. Editor, what it is that they produce? Will you calculate for me, how much of all thatis, they destroy?But even of what we do produce, under some colour or fancy, of service to humanity,—How much of itisof any service to humanity, good Mr. Editor? Here is a little bit of a note bearing on the matter, written last Christmas in a fit of incontrollable provocation at a Christian correspondent’s drawl of the popular sentiment, “living is so very expensive, you know!”Why, of course it is, living as you do, in a saucepan full of steam, with no potatoes in it!Here is the first economical fact I have been trying to teach, these fifteen years; and can’t get it, yet, into the desperate, leathern-skinned, death-helmeted skull of this wretched England—till Jael-Atropos drive it down, through skull and all, into the ground;—that you can’t[289]have bread without corn, nor milk without kine; and that being dragged about the country behind kettles won’t grow corn on it; and speculating in stocks won’t feed mutton on it; and manufacturing steel pens, and scrawling lies with them, won’t clothe your backs or fill your bellies, though you scrawl England as black with ink as you have strewed her black with cinders.Now look here: I am writing in a friend’s house in a lovely bit of pasture country, surrounding what was once a bright bit of purple and golden heath—inlaid as gorse and heather chose to divide their possession of it; and is now a dusty wilderness of unlet fashionable villas, bricks, thistles, and crockery. My friend has a good estate, and lets a large farm; but he can’t have cream to his tea, and has ‘Dorset’ butter.2If he ever gets any of these articles off his own farm, they are brought to him from London, having been carried there that they may pay toll to the railroad company once as they go up, and again as they come down; and have two chances of helping to smash an excursion train.Meantime, at the apothecary’s shop in the village, I can buy, besides drugs,—cigars, and stationery; and among other stationery, the ‘College card,’ of “eighteenusefularticles,”—namely, Bohemian glass ruler, Bohemian glass penholder, pen-box with gilt and diapered lid, pen-wiper[290]with a gilt tin fern leaf for ornament, pencil, india-rubber, and twelve steel pens,—all stitched separately and neatly on the card; and the whole array of them to be bought for sixpence.What times!—what civilization!—what ingenuity!—what cheapness!Yes; but what does it mean? First, that I, who buy the card, can’t get cream to my tea? And secondly, that the unhappy wretches,—Bohemian and other,—glass blowers, iron diggers, pen manufacturers, and the like,—who have made the eighteen useful articles, have sixpence to divide among them for their trouble! What sort of cream havetheyto their tea?But the question of questions about it all, is—Are these eighteen articles ‘useful articles’? For what? Here’s a—nominal—‘pencil’ on our ‘College card.’ But not a collegian, that I know of, wants to draw,—and if he did, he couldn’t draw withthisthing, which isnota pencil, but some sand and coal-dust jammed in a stick. The ‘india-rubber’ also, I perceive, is not india-rubber; but a composition for tearing up the surface of paper,—useful only to filthy blunderers; the nasty glass-handled things, which will break if I drop them, and cut the housemaid’s fingers, I shall instantly turn out of the house; the pens, for which I bought the card, will perhaps be useful to me, because I have, to my much misery, writing to do: butyou, happier animals, who may exist without scratching either paper or your[291]heads,—what is the use of them toyou? (N.B.I couldn’t write a word with one of them, after all.)I must go back to my Warrington friend; for there are more lessons to be received from him. I looked at him, in one sense, not undeferentially. He was, to the extent of his experience, as good a judge of art as I. He knew what his ‘Graphic’ was worth. Pronounced an entirely divine verdict upon it. Put it, beneficently, out of its pictorial pain,—for ever.Do not think that it is so difficult to know good art from bad. The poorest-minded public cannot rest in its bad possessions,—wants them new, and ever new. I have given my readers, who have trusted me, four art-possessions, which I do not fear their wishing to destroy; and it will be a long while before I wish them to get another. I have too long delayed beginning to tell themwhythey are good; and one of my Sheffield men asked Mr. Swan the other day what I had commended the Leucothea for,—“he couldn’t see anything in it.” To whom the first answer must be—Did you expect to, then? My good manufacturing friend, be assured there was no more thought of pleasingyouwhen Leucothea was carved, than of pleasing—Ganymede, when Rosalind was christened. Some day you will come to “like her name.”But, whether you ever come to ‘see anything in it’ or not, be assured that this, and the Lippi, and the Titian, and the Velasquez, are, all four, alike in one[292]quality, which you can respect, even if you do not envy. They are work of men doing their best. And whoseprideis in doing their best and most. You modern British workmen’s pride, I find more and more, is in doing ingeniously the worst, and least, you can.Again: they all four agree in being the work of men trained under true masters, and themselves able to be true masters to others. They belong, therefore, to what are properly called ‘schools’ of art. Whereas your modern British workman recognizes no master; but is, (as the result of his increasing intelligence, according to Mr. Mill,) less and less disposed “to be guided in the way which he should go by any prestige or authority.” The result of which is that every British artist has to find out how to paint as he best can; and usually begins to see his way to it, by the time he is sixty.Thirdly. They belong to schools which, orderly and obedient themselves, understood the law of order in all things. Which is the chief distinction between Art and Rudeness. And the first aim of every great painter, is to express clearly his obedience to the law of Kosmos, Order, or Symmetry.3The onlyperfectwork of the four[293]I have given, the Titian, binds itself by this symmetry most severely. Absolutely straight lines of screen behind the Madonna’s head,—a dark head on one side, a dark head on the other; a child on one side, a child on the other; a veil falling one way on one side, a scroll curling the other way on the other; a group of leaves in the child’s right hand balanced by another in the Madonna’s left; two opposed sprays of leaves on the table, and the whole clasped by a single cherry. In the Lippi, the symmetry is lateral; the Madonna fronting the group of the child central, with supporting angel on each side. In the Leucothea, the diminishing magnitudes of the attendant goddesses on the right are answered by the diminishing magnitudes from the seated goddess and the child, to the smallest figure at her knee, which clasps both the sides of the chain.Lastly, in the Velasquez, the little pyramid of a child, with her three tassels and central brooch, and a chair on each side of her, would have beentoosymmetrical, but for the interferent light in the dog.I said just now, the Titian was the onlyperfectone of the four. Everything there is done with absolute rightness: and you don’t see how. The hair in the Lippi is too stiff,—in the Velasquez, too slight; and one sees that it is drawn in the one, dashed in the other; but by Titian only, ‘painted’—you don’t know how.I say the Titian is the most perfect. It does not[294]follow that it is the best. There are gifts shown in the others, and feelings, which are not in it; and of which the relative worth may be matter of question. For instance, the Lippi, as I told you before, is a painting wrought in real Religion;—that is to say, in the binding of the heart in obedience to the conceived nature and laws of God.The Titian is wrought in what Mr. Harrison calls the Religion of Humanity: but ought more accurately to call, the Religion of Manity, (for the English use of the word ‘humane’ is continually making him confuse benevolence with religion,)—that is to say, in the binding of the heart in obedience to the nature and laws of Man.And, finally, the Velasquez is wrought in the still more developed Modern Religion of Dogity, or obedience of the heart to the nature and laws of Dog; (the lovely little idol, you observe, dominant on velvet throne, as formerly the Madonna). Of which religion, as faithfully held by the brave British Squire, in its widest Catholic form of horse-and-dog-ity, and passionately and tenderly indulged by the devoted British matron in the sectarian limitation of Lapdogity,—there is more to be told than Velasquez taught, or than we can learn, to-day.[295]NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.I. Affairs of the Company.I leave our accounts now wholly in the hands of Mr. Walker and Mr. Rydings, reserving to myself only the usual—as I understand—and proper functions of Director,—that of spending the Company’s money. I have ordered, as above stated, repairs at Barmouth, which will somewhat exceed our rents, I fancy; and a mineral cabinet for the Museum at Sheffield, in which the minerals are to rest, each in its own little cell, on purple, or otherwise fittingly coloured, velvet of the best. Permission to handle and examine them at ease will be eventually given, as a moral and mineralogical prize to the men who attain a certain proficiency in the two sciences of Mineralogy and Behaviour.Our capital, it will be observed, is increased, by honest gift, this month, to the encouraging amount of £16 16s.;—the iniquitous interest, of which our shareholders get none, I have pretty nearly spent in our new land purchase.Cash Account of St. George’s Company.(From June 15th to Aug. 15th, 1876.)1876.Dr.£s.d.June29.To Mrs. Jane Lisle11030.To,,Chas. Firth110Aug.7.To,,G. No. 50.1010012.To,,Miss Sargood220”Miss Christina Allen22015.To,,Balance due Mr. Ruskin14145£311051876.Cr.£s.d.June 16.By Balance due, Mr. Ruskin31105£31105[296]The Union Bank of London (Chancery Lane Branch) in Account with the St. George’s Fund.1876.Dr.£s.d.March15.To Balance1571110May3.To,,Cash Paid Mr. John Ruskin171106.To,,Ditto draft at Bridgwater (J. Talbot)91939.To,,Ditto draft at Douglas (E.Rydings)24189June9.To,,Ditto Cash50013.To,,Ditto, draft at Bridgwater (F. Talbot)20126”To,,Ditto, draft at Bilston (Wilkins)500017.To,,Ditto, Cash2000July6.To,,Dividend on £8000 Consols118100£424341876.Cr.£s.d.July28.By Cheque to Mr. John Ruskin33000Aug.15.To Balance9434£42434II. Affairs of the Master.It was not my fault, but my printers’ (who deserve raps for it), that mine came before the Company’s in last Fors.4It is, I think, now time to state, in general comment on my monotonous account, that the current expenses recorded in the bills of Jackson, Kate, Downs, and David, represent for the most part sums spent for the maintenance or comfort of others; and that I could if need were, for my own part, be utterly at ease in the sunny parlour of a village inn, with no more carriage or coachman than my own limbs,—no more service than a civil traveller’s proper share,—and the blessedness of freedom from responsibility from everything. To which condition, if I ever reduce myself by my extravagance, and, (indeed, just after paying my good Mr. Ellis for[297]thirteenth-century MSS.,5etc., a hundred and forty pounds, I am in treaty to-day with Mr. Quaritch for another, which he says is charged at the very lowest penny at three hundred and twenty)—it will be simply to me only occasion for the loadless traveller’s song; but as it would be greatly inconvenient to other people, I don’t at present intend it. Some day, indeed, perhaps I shall begin to turn a penny by my books. The bills drawn by Mr. Burgess represent now the only loss I incur on them.£s.d.Stated Balance, July 15th617113Repayment and other receipts, July and August406651023178Expenses42750Balance, August 15th£596128£s.d.July16.Geoghegan (blue neckties)400”Naval School55017.David6500”Downs250030.Jackson5000”Kate5000Aug.1.Herne Hill ground-rent230014.Burgess400015.Ellis and White14000”Lucy Tovey (gift)1000”Self (chiefly gone in black quartz from St Gothard Tunnel)1500£42750III.“My dear Sir,—I duly received your very kind note referring to the ‘notice to quit’ to Lord Lonsdale’s farmers in West[298]Cumberland, and have delayed to reply till I had made special inquiries, and find that, as a rule, these tenants have no leases, but have held their farms from year to year only.“Formerly, I am told, some had leases; but as these expired they were not renewed, and the supposition now is that all such have run out, and that all now as yearly tenants have had the notice given them simultaneously.“The notice is clearly given to allow a re-valuation to be made; and when the new rents are arranged, it is expected that leases will then be granted, though it is plain to be seen that all the increased prosperity that the prosperity of recent years of the coal and iron industries have caused to farming,may thus be secured to the landholder; and the farmers, with or without leases, but with higher rents, may be left to bear alone the ebb of the tide that is evidently on the turn; and in any or every case, the general public—the consumers of these farmers’ produce—will have to pay the extra rent, whatever it may be, that Lord Lonsdale may see fit to lay upon the land.6“I have been studying this matter—the increase of land-rents—for many years, and consider it is very much to blame for the present high prices of all land produce, and the distress amongst the poorest of our population, as well as being a great hindrance to the carrying out of any schemes that have for their object the application of more of our own labour to our own soil. In[299]a letter to my son a few weeks ago, I ventured to say that the man who was the first to demonstrate by actual experiment that English soil could be made to double or quadruple its produce, would earn the name of a new Columbus, in that he had discovered another America at our own doors. This son, my oldest, having shown a turn for mathematics, I was induced to send to Cambridge, my hope being that a good education might fit him to solve some of the problems that are so pressing us for solution (and which I had been essaying myself in the pamphlet on ‘Labour and Capital’); and as he now, on the completion of his second term, holds the second place in his year at St. John’s, there is a hope that he may take a good place in the mathematical tripos for 1878; and yet, since we got introduced to your books—two years ago—both he and I think he had best, so soon as he completes his course, go into farming; and hence the reference to growing crops that appeared in his letter last week, and which I am most happy to find has met with your approbation.” (Yes;—and I trust with higher approbation than mine.)IV. The following paragraphs from a county paper gladden me exceedingly, by taking from me all merit of originality in any part of the design of the operations of St. George’s Company, while they prove to the most incredulous not only the practicability, but the assured good of such operations, already, as will be seen, carried to triumphant results on a private gentleman’s estate.The ‘Agricultural Gazette’ gives, as one of a series of papers on “Noteworthy Agriculturists,” a sketch of Mr. William Mackenzie, Achandunie, who, acting for Mr. Matheson, has carried out so many improvements on the Ardross estates. The sketch is in the form of an autobiography, which, as the ‘Gazette’ remarks, carries with it a most pleasant impression of[300]directness and simplicity of character no less than of industry, energy, and success. It is accompanied by a portrait of Mr. Mackenzie, which his friends will recognize as a fair likeness. Mr. Mackenzie states that he was born in 1806, in the parish of Urquhart, Ross-shire, where his ancestors had resided for many generations. His father, who occupied a small farm, died about five years ago at the advanced age of ninety. In 1824, he (Mr. William Mackenzie) entered as an apprentice at Belmaduthy7Gardens, and after serving there three years, removed to the nurseries of Dickson and Co., Edinburgh, where he remained only a few months. He then went to the Duke of Buccleuch’s gardens at Dalkeith, serving under Mr. Macdonald, who was in advance of his time as a practical gardener. There he assisted in carrying out the improvements which were made in the gardens and pleasure-grounds. New ranges of hothouses and a fine conservatory were erected, into which the hot-water system of heating was, it is believed, first introduced in Scotland. Next Mr. Mackenzie assisted in laying out gardens and grounds at Barcaldine, the seat of Sir Duncan Campbell, in Argyllshire; and coming in 1835 to Rosehaugh, as head-gardener, forester, and superintendent of estate works, he carried out the construction of new gardens, both at Rosehaugh and Kinlochluichart, and the remodelling of private grounds and approaches. These large gardens at Barcaldine and Rosehaugh were made with great care,especially in selecting and preparing the soilfor the wall andvineryborders,so that after the lapse, in the one case of thirty years, and in the other of forty years, no decay or canker has appeared among the fruit trees.8[301]“In 1847 Mr. Matheson commenced the improvements at Ardross, the property of Alexander Matheson, Esq., M.P. for the county of Ross.“Ardross proper is surrounded by high hills, and with trifling exceptions was in a state of nature, the whole surface of the district being covered with coarse grass and heather, stunted birches, morass or quagmire, and studded with granite boulders drifted from the hills. The place was under sheep and a few black cattle, and, owing to the coarseness of the herbage the cattle were subject to red water.The tenants’ houses were mere hovels, without chimneys, and with little or no glass in the windows. The population of the district of Ardross proper was, in 1847, only 109 souls; and now, in 1875, the population on the same area is 600, and the number of children attending school is about 140.“In giving a summary of the improvements, we will begin with the pleasure-grounds.9They extend to about 800 acres. In forming them, waggons on rails were used for two years in removing knolls, forming terraces, and filling up gullies. The banks of the river and of the burns flowing through the grounds have been planted with upwards of a hundred different varieties of the finest and hardiest ornamental trees that could be procured, from the tulip-tree to the evergreen oak, and from the native pine to the Wellingtonia. Evergreen shrubs cover about 25 acres in detached portions on the banks of the river which flows immediately beneath the castle, as well as on the banks of two romantic burns, with beautiful cascades, and in ravines. The garden is enclosed with a brick-lined wall, and so boggy was the site that the foundation of the wall is more than 6 feet below[302]the sills of some of the doors. The south side is enclosed by a terrace wall 12 feet high, and the north wall is covered with glass, which includes vineries, conservatory, and orchard houses, besides a range of pits, all heated with water.The soil of the garden was prepared and carted a considerable distance,10as there was none to be got on the site.“Upwards of 5000 acres of moor ground have been planted, chiefly with Scotch fir and larch, the thinnings of which are now being shipped for pit props, the plants of the oldest woods only having been taken out of the nursery in 1847.“The extent of arable land may be best explained by stating that there are twenty-seven farms with thrashing mills, paying rents from £50 to £800 each; and upwards of a hundred ploughs are used in cultivating the lands improved. The steam plough is also to be seen at work on some of the farms.” (St. George does not, however, propose entertaining the curious spectator in this manner.) “Cattle reared on the reclaimed land have taken prizes at the Highland Society’s Shows, and at all local shows; and for cereals and green crops, they will bear a favourable comparison with any part of Scotland.“At one of the detached properties, great care had to be taken, and engineering skill used, in the drainage. Recently a low-lying part of the lands, a mile and a half long by three-quarters broad, was a mixture of the lower stratum of peaty bog, marsh, and spouty sand, charged with ochrey-coloured water, impregnated with sulphur and saltpetre. Attempts made by former occupants to drain this place were fruitless, from want of depth and proper outfall. We found all the pipes in their drains completely choked by deposited ochrey matter. The[303]whole subsoil was running sand. In order to make the drainage perfect, a main leading drain was made, 800 yards long, and in some places 8 feet deep, in which were laid ‘spigot and faucet,’ vitrified pipes 10 to 15 inches in diameter, jointed with cement to prevent sand from getting in, with junctions to receive pipes of smaller sizes, from 10 inches down to 6 inches. Minor drains are from 3½ to 4 feet deep, with tiles of 2 to 4 inch bore, the smaller sizes having collars on the joints. Large stone cisterns are formed to receive the silt, and ventilating shafts with iron gratings are built to give circulation of air. By these means the whole flat is drained effectually,and where bog rushes were the prevailing produce, crops of the richest wheat now grow.The stunted herbage and water were so poisonous that black cattle were known to have turned gray in a season (?).11“More than fifty miles of private roads have been made, and twelve miles of walks through the pleasure-grounds. One walk is six miles continuous, along the windings of fine scenery of the Alness. Upwards of forty miles of stone dykes and eighty of wire fences have been erected, enclosing the arable land and plantations.“For twenty years from three to four hundred men were employed; two hundred of them lived in a square of barracks for nearly eleven years,and so orderly were they that the services of a policeman were never required. There are still a number of men employed, but the improvements are now coming to a close.“All the assistance I had in the engineering and planning was[304]that of a young man only seventeen years old when the works were begun, and we never had occasion to employ a man for a single day re-doing work.“I may further add that I have now the great pleasure of seeing my liberal employer reletting all his farms on the Ardross estate to the same tenants, on a second nineteen years’ lease,” (at increased rents, of course, my friend?) “the second leases having been renewed between two and three years before the expiry of the previous leases, and none of the farms were ever advertised.“I cannot leave this part of the present brief sketch without noticing a feature in the important work so successfully carried out by my enlightened employer, and one which cannot fail to be a source of great satisfaction to himself. Among the first things he did was to establish a school in the district, with a most efficient teacher, and the result is that sons of the small farmers and labourers are now in respectable positions in various walks of life. They are to be found in the capacities of gardeners, artizans, and merchants, students of law, medicine, and divinity. One of them, Donald Ross, carried the Queen’s prize of £100 in the University, and is now one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. Another is the chief constable of the county. Others are in the colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and America, all doing well;and out of hundreds working for themselves, to my knowledge, not one has gone astray.12“I will now advert to the improvements on the west coast estates. A mansion-house was built in the parish of Kintail, with pleasure-grounds and gardens,the former being chiefly reclaimed from the sea. Two islands, which were surrounded by water 11 feet deep on the shore side, are now part of the lawn, the intervening spaces having been filled up by the removal of a hill of rotten rock.[305]This house is let to a shooting tenant. The garden is excellent for fruit, including peaches, nectarines, and apricots, which come to perfection. At Duncraig, recently, a new mansion-house has been built, with all the modern appliances. New gardens have also been made at Duncraig, the site of which was originally a narrow gully running between high ridges of rock. The gardens are upwards of two acres within the walls. The soil is composed of virgin soil and turfy loam, the whole having been carted a considerable distance. The gardens were completed in 1871, and the different kinds of fruit trees, including pears, peaches, and apricots, are now bearing.“Duncraig is rarely to be surpassed in scenery and beauty. The view is extensive, embracing the Cuchullin hills in Skye,” (etc., etc.) “There are two fresh-water lakes within the grounds, one covering thirty-seven acres, and the other about sixty acres, abounding with excellent trout and char. One of them supplies Duncraig House with water, having a fall of about 300 feet. The pipe in its course supplies the gardens; the livery stables and laundry have also connections for applying hose in cases of fire.“The conformation of the ground is a mingling of winding valleys with high rock hills, on which grow natural wood, such as birch, oak, ash, and mountain ash. Several of the valleys have been improved and laid out under permanent pasture, making the landscape, as seen from the front of the house, with wood, rock, and winding grassy bay, very picturesque.“There are twelve miles of private drives and walks—miles of them cut out of the solid rock, and in some places in the face of precipices 100 feet sheer up above the sea. A home-farm is in course of being improved at Achandarroch, a mile south of Duncraig House.”The ‘Gazette’ adds: Mr. Mackenzie himself farms some of the land which he has reclaimed, and nowhere probably is there a better example of what is possible in the way of agricultural improvement under a northern climate. Excellent crops of[306]barley, clover, wheat, and roots are grown where nothing but a marshy wilderness once existed. Here obviously are the circumstances and the experience which should guide and stimulate the efforts of estate owners and improvers in the way of the reclamation of land which is now waste and worthless.“Holme Head, Carlisle,“July 6th, 1875.“Dear Sir,—When I read the number of ‘Fors’ for last April, and came to your account of the rose-leaf cutting bees, I recollected that I had seen one of these bees making its fragmentary cell in a hole in a brick wall, and that I had often seen the remnants of the cut leaves; but I never had a chance of watching them when at work till last week; and thinking the result may be interesting to you, and may correct the omission you refer to at the foot of page 104 in the April ‘Fors,’ I take the liberty to send them to you.“I had the opportunity of seeing a great many bees—often half a dozen together—at work upon a solitary dog-rose in front of a house at a small watering-place (Silloth), and I observed that they cut various shapes at different times. I picked off a great many of the leaves that they had been at, and send you herewith one or two specimens. I find that these have occasionally cut through the midrib of the leaf; but this is a rare exception. I found they carried the cuttings to some adjoining sand-hills, where they had bored small holes in the sand; and in these they built their leaf-cells. The pollen in these cells was not purple, but yellow, and may have been gathered from the Hawkweed which covers the banks where their nests are made.“Since we came home, I have found some more leaves in my own garden similarly cut. The leaves I find to be cut in this way are the rose, French bean, and young laburnum.“Yours truly,“W. Lattimer.”[307]V. Part of a letter from the lady who sent me Helix virgata:—“We live in a poor neighbourhood, and I have come to know the history of many poor working people lately; and I want to understand so much about it, even more than I used to long to understand the mysterious life of shells and flowers. Why aren’t there public baths, etc., for children as much as public schools? They want washing more than teaching. ‘Hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and bodies washed in pure water,’is continually sounding in my ears.” (Well—why don’t you go and wash some, then?)“A poor woman, whose father was a West Country carrier,” (very good, but what isshe?—the gist of the story depends on that: at present it’s like one of those French twisty Bulimi, with no beginning to it,) “was so delighted the other day to find we knew the ‘West Country;’ and when I was saying something about our intending to take the children down in May to pick cowslips, her face gleamed with delight as she said, ‘Oh, the years since I’ve seen a cowslip!’ We used to make ‘tisties’ ” (twisties?) “of them, and it sent a thrill of remembrance through me of my own birthday treats, and cowslip-ball days.“But I’m so glad you like the shells. No, thereisnothing about vegetables in the word Bulimus; but ‘empty-bellied’ generally is hungry, and hungry generally eats a great deal when opportunity offers. Now these ‘Bulimi’ eat a great deal, (ofvegetables, it happens,) so I suppose some one who named them thought they must be very hungry or ‘empty-bellied.’ That’s the way I read the story.” Well, it’s very accommodating and ingenious of you to read it that way; but many snails, thrushes, blackbirds, or old gentlemen of my acquaintance who ‘eat a great deal,’ appear to me more suggestive of the epithet ‘full-’ than ‘empty-’—waist-coated, shall we say?[308]VI. Week’s Diary of a Companion of St. George:—“First day.—Received from Sheffield a dainty ‘well-poised little hammer’ and three sharp-pointed little chisels: felt quite cheerful about porphyry-cutting.“Second day.—Sent to the village in the morning for a slab of freestone; employed man in the afternoon to chisel a hole in it, and to fix the porphyry therein with plaster-of-Paris; drew a straight line, thinking it wiser not to begin with an asterisk; turned the points of two chisels without making the least impression on my line;—the process turned out to be skating, not engraving. Tried the third chisel, and, after diligent efforts, made a cut equal in depth to about two grains of sand. This is the Hamite bondage of art. Felt an increasing desire that the Master should try it, and a respect for the ancient Egyptians. Bore patiently the scoffs of the Amorites.“Third day.—Sent chisel to the village to be hardened. Was recommended a lead hammer. Finally, a friend went to the village and brought back with him an iron hammer and two shorter chisels. Was asked by an Amorite gardener how I was ‘getting on’—unconcealed pleasure on his part to hear that I was not getting on at all. Later, accomplished a beautifully irregular star-fish, which looksmashed outrather thancut, not the least like ‘sharp cliff-edged harbours,’ as the Master kindly supposes. I begin to feel for the ancient Egyptians: they must have got a great deal of porphyry-dust into their eyes. I shall rise in the morning to dulled points and splintered chisels; but ‘whenyou have cut your asterisk, you will know,’ etc., and this is not the voice of a syren, (see ‘Eagle’s Nest,’) but of my honoured Master.… A terrible suspicion occurs to me that he thought no one would or could cut it! Obedience is a fine thing! How it works in the midst of difficulties, dust, and worst of all—doubt!“Fourth day.—I think porphyry-cutting is delightful work: it[309]is true that I have not done any to-day, but I have had my chisels sharpened, and two new ones have arrived from the blacksmith this evening, made out of old files. Also, I have covered my chisels with pretty blue paper, and my hammer with blue-and-white ribbon. I feel the importance of the step gained. Surely I may rest righteously after such labour. If they sing ‘From Egypt lately come,’ in church, I shall think it very personal.“Fifth day.—My piece of porphyry is now enriched by a second star-fish, with a little more backbone in it, and two dividing lines. I worked on the lawn this morning, under thechestnuttree;—the derision of the Amorite gardener (who was mowing the grasswith a scythe) was manifested by the remark ‘Isthat-tall!’ I told him about the Egyptian tombs, but he probably thinks me mildly insane; he however suggested a flat edge instead of a point to a chisel, and I will try it.“Sixth day.—Had lead hammer cast, and waited for chisel.“Seventh day.—With third hammer and seventh chisel will surely charm the porphyry.“But, no! my latest asterisk is jagged in outline instead of sharp. I wonder what attempts others have made. Any one living in or near a blacksmith’s shop would have an advantage, for the chisels are always wanting hardening, or rectifying in some way; and my blue papers soon disappeared. If obedience for the sake of obedience is angelic, I must be an exalted creature. One Amorite’s suggestion was, ‘You would do a deal better with a softer material.’ This was the voice of the tempter.“What is gained?—(besides a lifelong affection for porphyry)—a knowledge of one more thing that I cannotdo; an admiration (to a certain extent) of those who could do it; and a wonder as to what the Master will require next of (amongst others) his faithful and obedient disciple.”[310]VII. Portion of valuable letter from Mr. Sillar:—“Kingswood Lodge, Lee Green, S.E.“August 7th, 1876.“My dear Mr. Ruskin,—It may interest your correspondent, ‘A Reader of Fors,’ and possibly yourself also, to know that interested persons have altered old John Wesley’s rules to suit modern ideas.“Rules of the Methodist Societies (Tyerman’s Life and Times of Wesley, p. 431).“Rule.—Leader to receive once a week what members are willing to give towardsrelief of the poor.“Altered to ‘support of the Gospel.’“Going to lawforbidden, is altered to ‘brothergoing to law withbrother.’“Original Rule.—The giving or taking things on usury, the words have been added, ‘that is, unlawful interest.’“Mr. Tyerman remarks, ‘the curious reader will forgive these trifles.’“I for one do not at all feel disposed to do so.”(Nor does St. George; nor has he either leave, or hope, to say, “God forgive them.”)[311]1Whatcanbe done, ultimately, it is not yet in human imagination to conceive. Whathasbeen done, by one sensible man, for the land he had under control, may be read in the fourth article of our correspondence.↑2Most London theatre-goers will recollect the Butterman’s pity for his son, in “Our Boys,” as he examines the remains of the breakfast in their lodgings.↑3The law of symmetry, however, rests on deeper foundations than that of mere order. It is here, in Greek terms, too subtle to be translated except bit by bit, as we want them.Τίς οὖν δὴ πρᾶξις φίλη καὶ ἀκόλουθος θεῷ; μία καὶ ἕνα λόγον ἔχουσα ἀρχαῖον, ὅτι τῷ μὲν ὀμοίῳ τὸ ὅμοιον ὄντι μετρίῳ φίλον ἂν εἴη, τὰ δ’ ἄμετρα οὔτ’ ἀλλήλοις οὔτε τοῖς ἐμμέτροις.—(Plato, Laws, Book IV.)↑4Note by printer:—“We did this to avoid an unseemly division of balance-sheet, and of two evils thought this the least.”↑5One of these is a perfect English Bible, folio, and in beautiful state, sent to Sheffield for the first volume of our Museum library. Of course I must make St. George a present of it.↑6As I correct this sheet, Fors places another Carlisle paper in my hand; from which I gather that Lord Lonsdale’s conceptions of what is fit, and not, are probably now changed. But my correspondent is wrong inassumingthat the public will have to pay the extra rent. Very probably they will if the farming improvements are fallacious; but if indeed produce can be raised at less expense, the increased rentmayrepresent only the difference between past and present cost of production. In this sense, however, the publicdopay Lord Lonsdale’s extra rent, that their market prices, but for his Lordship, would have been lowered. As matters stand, they may be thankful if they are not raised.↑7I can’t be responsible for these Scotch names. I sent the slip of paper to my printers, and ‘on their eyes be it.’↑8Italics mine (throughout the article, the rest of which is in Mr. Mackenzie’s own words). Have the vine-proprietors of Europe yet begun to look to the Earth—not the air, as the power that fails them? (See noted.)↑9It will, I hope, not be thought an absurdity in the St. George’s Company to retain on their estates ‘pleasure-grounds’ for theirtenants, instead of themselves. In this one respect, and in this only, their public work will differ from this admirable piece of ‘private enterprise.’↑10Supposing the labour of all navvies, gold-diggers, and bad architects, throughout the world during the last fifty years, had been spent entirely in carting soil to where it was wanted for vegetables,—my dinnerless friends, you would have found the difference, by this time!↑11This passage, in capitals, being wholly astounding to me, I venture to put a note of interrogation to it. I have long myself been questioning the farmers in Westmoreland about the quantity of rank bog grass they let grow. Buttheironly idea of improvement is to burn the heather; this being a cheap operation, and dangerous only to their neighbours’ woods. Brantwood was within an ace of becoming Brantashes last summer.↑12The name of the—certainlyveryefficient—teacher of these young people, and the general principles of their tuition, would have been a desirable addition, St. George thinks, to the information furnished by Mr. Mackenzie.↑

FORS CLAVIGERA.LETTER LXIX.

I have just been down to Barmouth to see the tenants on the first bit of ground,—noble crystalline rock, I am thankful to say,—possessed by St. George in the island.I find the rain coming through roofs, and the wind through walls, more than I think proper, and have ordered repairs; and for some time to come, the little rents of these cottages will be spent entirely in the bettering of them, or in extending some garden ground, fenced with furze hedge against the west wind by the most ingenious of our tenants.And in connection with this first—however small—beginning under my own eyes of St. George’s work,—(already some repairs had been made by my direction, under the superintendence of the donor of the land, Mrs. Talbot, before I could go to see the place)—I must state again clearly our St. George’s principle of rent. It is taken first as the acknowledgment[276]of the authority of the Society over the land, and in the amount judged by the Master to be just, according to the circumstances of the person and place, for the tenant to pay as a contribution to the funds of the Society. The tenant has no claim to the return of the rent in improvements on his ground or his house; and I order the repairs at Barmouth as part of the Company’s general action, not as return of the rent to the tenant. The reader will thus see that our so-called ‘rents’ are in fact taxes laid on the tenants for the advancement of the work of the Company. And all so-called rents are, in like manner, taxes laid on the labourer for the advancement of the work of his landlord. If that work be beneficial, on the whole, to the estate, and of all who live on it, the rents are on a right footing; but if they are abstracted by the landlord to his own private uses, he is merely another form of the old mediæval Knight of Evilstone, living as hawk in eyrie.It chanced, while I set this work on foot at Barmouth, that a paragraph was sent me out of a Carlisle paper, giving the information that all Lord Lonsdale’s tenants have received notice to quit, that the farms might be re-valued. I requested my correspondent to ascertain for me the manner of the holdings on Lord Lonsdale’s estates;—his reply is the third article in our correspondence this month, and I beg to recommend it to the reader’s most earnest attention. What it says of[277]rents, with the exception indicated in my note, is right; and cannot be more tersely or clearly expressed. What it says of ground-produce is only partially right. To discover another America at our own doors would not be any advantage to us;—nor even to make England bigger. We have no business to want England to be bigger, any more than the world to be bigger. The question is not, forus, how much land God ought to have given us; but to fill the land Hehasgiven us, with the wisest and best inhabitants we can. I could give a plan, if I chose, with great ease, for the maintenance of a greatly increased quantity of inhabitants, on iron scaffolding, by pulverizing our mountains, and strewing the duly pulverized and, by wise medical geology, drugged, materials, over the upper stages; carrying on our present ingenious manufactures in the dark lower stories. But the arrangement, even if it could be at once achieved, would be of no advantage to England.Whereas St. George’s arrangements, which are to take the hills, streams, and fields that God has made for us; to keep them as lovely, pure, and orderly as we can;1to gather their carefully cultivated fruit in due season; and if our children then multiply so that we cannot feed them, to seek other lands to cultivate in like manner,—these arrangements, I repeat, will be found[278]very advantageous indeed, as they always have been; wheresoever even in any minor degree enforced. In some happy countries they have been so, many a long year already; and the following letter from a recent traveller in one of them, may further illustrate the description given in a Fors of early date, of the felicity verily and visibly to be secured by their practice.“Salzburg,July 30, 1876.“Dear Professor Ruskin,—I have long intended to write to you, but the mountain of matters I had to tell you has increased till Pelion is piled upon Ossa within my mind, and so I must confine myself to one or two points. In the Black Forest, and more especially in remote mountain valleys of Tyrol, I have found the people living more or less according to principles laid down for the Company of St. George. I have seen the rules so much decried, and even ridiculed, in England, wrought into the whole life of the people. One may still find villages and communes where lawsuits are impossible—a head-man of their own deciding all disputes; where the simplest honesty and friendliness are all but universal, and the stranger is taken in only in the better sense of the phrase; where the nearest approach to steam power is the avalanche of early summer; where there are no wheeled vehicles, and all burthens are carried on the backs of men and mules,” (my dear friend, I really don’t want people to do without[279]donkey-carts, or pony-chaises; nay, I was entirely delighted at Dolgelly, the other day, to meet a four-in-hand coach—driven by the coachman’s daughter;) “where rich and poor must fare alike on the simple food and cheap but sound wine of the country; where the men still carve wood, and the women spin and weave, during the long hours of winter; and where the folk still take genuine delight in picturesque dress, and daily church-going, and have not reduced both to the dreary felon’s uniform of English respectability. With these unconscious followers of Ruskin, and Companions of St. George, I formed deep friendships; and for me, if I ever revisit the wild recesses of the Œtzthal, it will almost be like going amongst my own people and to my own home. Indeed, wherever I left the beaten track of tourists, and the further I left it, so did the friendliness of my entertainers increase. It was evident they regarded me not as a mere purse-bearing animal, but as an argosy of quite a different sort—a human spirit coming from afar, from a land ‘belonging,’ as one of them conjectured, ‘to Spain,’ and laden with all kinds of new knowledge and strange ideas, of which they would gladly have some share. And so towards the close of a dinner, or supper, the meek-eyed hostess would come and sit beside me, hoping I had enjoyed a ‘happy meal;’ and after a complimentary sip from my glass, ask me all sorts of delightful and simple questions about myself, and my family, and my country.[280]Or the landlord would come sometimes,—alas, at the very beginning of a meal,—and from huge pipe bowl, wonderfully painted with Crucifixion or Madonna, blow clouds of anything but incense smoke. But the intention of honouring and amusing me were none the less apparent.”With my friend’s pleasant days among this wise and happy people, I will forthwith compare the very unpleasant day I spent myself on my journey to Barmouth, among unwise and wretched ones; one incident occurring in it being of extreme significance. I had driven from Brantwood in early morning down the valley of the Crake, and took train first at the Ulverston station, settling myself in the corner of a carriage next the sea, for better prospect thereof. In the other corner was a respectable, stolid, middle-aged man reading his paper.I had left my Coniston lake in dashing ripples under a south wind, thick with rain; but the tide lay smooth and silent along the sands; melancholy in absolute pause of motion, nor ebb nor flow distinguishable;—here and there, among the shelves of grey shore, a little ruffling of their apparent pools marked stray threadings of river-current.At Grange, talking loud, got in two young coxcombs; who reclined themselves on the opposite cushions. One had a thin stick, with which, in a kind of St. Vitus’s dance, partly affectation of nonchalance, partly real fever[281]produced by the intolerable idleness of his mind and body, he rapped on the elbow of his seat, poked at the button-holes of the window strap, and switched his boots, or the air, all the way from Grange to the last station before Carnforth,—he and his friend talking yacht and regatta, listlessly;—the St. Vitus’s, meantime, dancing one expressing his opinion that “the most dangerous thing to do on these lakes was going before the wind.” The respectable man went on reading his paper, without notice of them. None of the three ever looked out of the windows at sea or shore. There was not much to look at, indeed, through the driving, and gradually closer-driven, rain,—except the drifting about of the seagulls, and their quiet dropping into the pools, their wings kept open for an instant till their breasts felt the water well; then closing their petals of white light, like suddenly shut water flowers.The two regatta men got out, in drenching rain, on the coverless platform at the station before Carnforth, and all the rest of us at Carnforth itself, to wait for the up train. The shed on the up-line side, even there, is small, in which a crowd of third-class passengers were packed close by the outside drip. I did not see one, out of some twenty-five or thirty persons, tidily dressed, nor one with a contented and serenely patient look. Lines of care, of mean hardship, of comfortless submission, of gnawing anxiety, or ill-temper, characterized every face.[282]The train came up, and my poor companions were shuffled into it speedily, in heaps. I found an empty first-class carriage for myself: wondering how long universal suffrage would allow itself to be packed away in heaps, for my convenience.At Lancaster, a father and daughter got in; presumably commercial. Father stoutly built and firm-featured, sagacious and cool. The girl hard and common; well dressed, except that her hat was cocked too high on her hair. They both read papers all the way to Warrington. I was not myself employed much better; the incessant rain making the windows a mere wilderness of dirty dribblings; and neither Preston nor Wigan presenting anything lively to behold, I had settled myself to Mrs. Brown on Spelling Bees, (an unusually forced and poor number of Mrs. Brown, by the way).I had to change at Warrington for Chester. The weather bettered a little, while I got a cup of tea and slice of bread in the small refreshment room; contemplating, the while, in front of me, the panels of painted glass on its swinging doors, which represented two troubadours, in broadly striped blue and yellow breeches, purple jackets, and plumed caps; with golden-hilted swords, and enormous lyres. Both had soft curled moustaches, languishing eyes, open mouths, and faultless legs. Meanwhile, lounged at the counter behind me, much bemused in beer, a perfect example of the special type of youthful blackguard now developing generally[283]in England; more or less blackly pulpous and swollen in all the features, and with mingled expression of intense grossness and intense impudence,—half pig, half jackdaw.There got in with me, when the train was ready, a middle-class person of commercial-traveller aspect, who had possessed himself of a ‘Graphic’ from the news-boy; and whom I presently forgot, in examining the country on a line new to me, which became quickly, under gleams of broken sunlight, of extreme interest. Azure-green fields of deep corn; undulations of sandstone hill, with here and there a broken crag at the edge of a cutting; presently the far glittering of the Solway-like sands of Dee, and rounded waves of the Welsh hills on the southern horizon, formed a landscape more fresh and fair than I have seen for many a day, from any great line of English rail. When I looked back to my fellow-traveller, he was sprawling all his length on the cushion of the back seat, with his boots on his ‘Graphic,’—not to save the cushions assuredly, but in the foul modern carelessness of everything which we have ‘done with’ for the moment;—his face clouded with sullen thought, as of a person helplessly in difficulty, and not able to give up thinking how to avoid the unavoidable.In a minute or two more I found myself plunged into the general dissolution and whirlpool of porters, passengers, and crook-boned trucks, running round corners[284]against one’s legs, of the great Chester station. A simply-dressed upper-class girl of sixteen or seventeen, strictly and swiftly piloting her little sister through the populace, was the first human creature I had yet seen, on whom sight could rest without pain. The rest of the crowd was a mere dismal fermentation of the Ignominious.The train to Ruabon was crowded, and I was obliged to get into a carriage with two cadaverous sexagenarian spinsters, who had been keeping the windows up, all but a chink, for fear a drop of rain or breath of south wind should come in, and were breathing the richest compound of products of their own indigestion. Pretending to be anxious about the construction of the train, I got the farther window down, and my body well out of it; then put it only half-way up when the train left, and kept putting my head out without my hat; so as, if possible, to impress my fellow-passengers with the imminence of a collision, which could only be averted by extreme watchfulness on my part. Then requesting, with all the politeness I could muster, to be allowed to move a box with which they had occupied the corner-seat—“that I might sit face to the air”—I got them ashamed to ask that the window might be shut up again; but they huddled away into the opposite corner to make me understand how they suffered from the draught. Presently they got out two bags of blue grapes, and[285]ate away unanimously, availing themselves of my open window to throw out rolled-up pips and skins.General change, to my extreme relief, as to their’s, was again required at Ruabon, effected by a screwing backwards and forwards, for three-quarters of an hour, of carriages which one was expecting every five minutes to get into; and which were puffed and pushed away again the moment one opened a door, with loud calls of ‘Stand back there.’ A group of half a dozen children, from eight to fourteen—the girls all in straw hats, with long hanging scarlet ribands—were more or less pleasant to see meanwhile; and sunshine through the puffs of petulant and cross-purposed steam, promised a pleasant run to Llangollen.I had only the conventional ‘business man with a paper’ for this run; and on his leaving the carriage at Llangollen, was just closing the door, thinking to have both windows at command, when my hand was stayed by the father of a family of four children, who, with their mother and aunt, presently filled the carriage, the children fitting or scrambling in anywhere, with expansive kicks and lively struggles. They belonged to the lower middle-class; the mother an ideal of the worthy commonplace, evidently hard put to it to make both ends meet, and wholly occupied in family concerns; her face fixed in the ignoble gravity of virtuous persons to whom their own troublesome households have become monasteries. The father, slightly[286]more conscious of external things, submitting benevolently to his domestic happiness out on its annual holiday. The children ugly, fidgety, and ill-bred, but not unintelligent,—full of questionings, ‘when’ they were to get here, or there? how many rails there were on the line; which side the station was on, and who was to meet them. In such debate, varied by bodily contortions in every direction, they contrived to pass the half-hour which took us through the vale of Llangollen, past some of the loveliest brook and glen scenery in the world. But neither the man, the woman, nor any one of the children, looked out of the window once, the whole way.They got out at Corwen, leaving me to myself for the run past Bala lake and down the Dolgelly valley; but more sorrowful than of late has been my wont, in the sense of my total isolation from the thoughts and ways of the present English people. For I was perfectly certain that among all the crowd of living creatures whom I had that day seen,—scarlet ribands and all,—there was not one to whom I could have spoken a word on any subject interesting to me, which would have been intelligible to them.But the first broad sum of fact, for the sake of which I have given this diary, is that among certainly not less than some seven or eight hundred people, seen by me in the course of this day, I saw not one happy face, and several hundreds of entirely miserable ones.[287]The second broad sum of fact is, that out of the few,—not happy,—but more or less spirited and complacent faces I saw, among the lower and the mercantile classes, what life or spirit they had depended on a peculiar cock-on-a-dunghill character of impudence, which meant a total inability to conceive any good or lovely thing in this world or any other: and the third sum of fact is, that in this rich England I saw only eight out of eight hundred persons gracefully dressed, and decently mannered. But the particular sign, and prophetic vision of the day, to me, was the man lying with his boots on his ‘Graphic.’ There is a long article in the ‘Monetary Gazette,’ sent me this morning, on the folly of the modern theory that the nation is suffering from ‘over-production.’ The writer is quite correct in his condemnation of the fallacy in question; but it has not occurred to him, nor to any other writer that I know of on such matters, to consider whether we may not possibly be suffering from over-destruction. If you use a given quantity of steam power and human ingenuity to produce your ‘Graphic’ in the morning, and travel from Warrington to Chester with your boots upon it in the afternoon,—Is the net result, production, my dear editor? The net result is labour with wearinessA.M.,—idleness with disgustP.M.,—and nothing to eat next day. And do not think our Warrington friend other than a true type of your modern British employer of industry. The universal British public has[288]no idea of any other use of art, or industry, than he! It reclines everlastingly with its boots on its ‘Graphic.’ ‘To-morrow there will be another,—what use is there in the old?’ Think of the quantity of energy used in the ‘production’ of the daily works of the British press? The first necessity of our lives in the morning,—old rags in the evening! Or the annual works of the British naval architect? The arrow of the Lord’s deliverance in January, and old iron in June! The annual industry of the European soldier,—of the European swindler,—of the European orator,—will you tell me, good Mr. Editor, what it is that they produce? Will you calculate for me, how much of all thatis, they destroy?But even of what we do produce, under some colour or fancy, of service to humanity,—How much of itisof any service to humanity, good Mr. Editor? Here is a little bit of a note bearing on the matter, written last Christmas in a fit of incontrollable provocation at a Christian correspondent’s drawl of the popular sentiment, “living is so very expensive, you know!”Why, of course it is, living as you do, in a saucepan full of steam, with no potatoes in it!Here is the first economical fact I have been trying to teach, these fifteen years; and can’t get it, yet, into the desperate, leathern-skinned, death-helmeted skull of this wretched England—till Jael-Atropos drive it down, through skull and all, into the ground;—that you can’t[289]have bread without corn, nor milk without kine; and that being dragged about the country behind kettles won’t grow corn on it; and speculating in stocks won’t feed mutton on it; and manufacturing steel pens, and scrawling lies with them, won’t clothe your backs or fill your bellies, though you scrawl England as black with ink as you have strewed her black with cinders.Now look here: I am writing in a friend’s house in a lovely bit of pasture country, surrounding what was once a bright bit of purple and golden heath—inlaid as gorse and heather chose to divide their possession of it; and is now a dusty wilderness of unlet fashionable villas, bricks, thistles, and crockery. My friend has a good estate, and lets a large farm; but he can’t have cream to his tea, and has ‘Dorset’ butter.2If he ever gets any of these articles off his own farm, they are brought to him from London, having been carried there that they may pay toll to the railroad company once as they go up, and again as they come down; and have two chances of helping to smash an excursion train.Meantime, at the apothecary’s shop in the village, I can buy, besides drugs,—cigars, and stationery; and among other stationery, the ‘College card,’ of “eighteenusefularticles,”—namely, Bohemian glass ruler, Bohemian glass penholder, pen-box with gilt and diapered lid, pen-wiper[290]with a gilt tin fern leaf for ornament, pencil, india-rubber, and twelve steel pens,—all stitched separately and neatly on the card; and the whole array of them to be bought for sixpence.What times!—what civilization!—what ingenuity!—what cheapness!Yes; but what does it mean? First, that I, who buy the card, can’t get cream to my tea? And secondly, that the unhappy wretches,—Bohemian and other,—glass blowers, iron diggers, pen manufacturers, and the like,—who have made the eighteen useful articles, have sixpence to divide among them for their trouble! What sort of cream havetheyto their tea?But the question of questions about it all, is—Are these eighteen articles ‘useful articles’? For what? Here’s a—nominal—‘pencil’ on our ‘College card.’ But not a collegian, that I know of, wants to draw,—and if he did, he couldn’t draw withthisthing, which isnota pencil, but some sand and coal-dust jammed in a stick. The ‘india-rubber’ also, I perceive, is not india-rubber; but a composition for tearing up the surface of paper,—useful only to filthy blunderers; the nasty glass-handled things, which will break if I drop them, and cut the housemaid’s fingers, I shall instantly turn out of the house; the pens, for which I bought the card, will perhaps be useful to me, because I have, to my much misery, writing to do: butyou, happier animals, who may exist without scratching either paper or your[291]heads,—what is the use of them toyou? (N.B.I couldn’t write a word with one of them, after all.)I must go back to my Warrington friend; for there are more lessons to be received from him. I looked at him, in one sense, not undeferentially. He was, to the extent of his experience, as good a judge of art as I. He knew what his ‘Graphic’ was worth. Pronounced an entirely divine verdict upon it. Put it, beneficently, out of its pictorial pain,—for ever.Do not think that it is so difficult to know good art from bad. The poorest-minded public cannot rest in its bad possessions,—wants them new, and ever new. I have given my readers, who have trusted me, four art-possessions, which I do not fear their wishing to destroy; and it will be a long while before I wish them to get another. I have too long delayed beginning to tell themwhythey are good; and one of my Sheffield men asked Mr. Swan the other day what I had commended the Leucothea for,—“he couldn’t see anything in it.” To whom the first answer must be—Did you expect to, then? My good manufacturing friend, be assured there was no more thought of pleasingyouwhen Leucothea was carved, than of pleasing—Ganymede, when Rosalind was christened. Some day you will come to “like her name.”But, whether you ever come to ‘see anything in it’ or not, be assured that this, and the Lippi, and the Titian, and the Velasquez, are, all four, alike in one[292]quality, which you can respect, even if you do not envy. They are work of men doing their best. And whoseprideis in doing their best and most. You modern British workmen’s pride, I find more and more, is in doing ingeniously the worst, and least, you can.Again: they all four agree in being the work of men trained under true masters, and themselves able to be true masters to others. They belong, therefore, to what are properly called ‘schools’ of art. Whereas your modern British workman recognizes no master; but is, (as the result of his increasing intelligence, according to Mr. Mill,) less and less disposed “to be guided in the way which he should go by any prestige or authority.” The result of which is that every British artist has to find out how to paint as he best can; and usually begins to see his way to it, by the time he is sixty.Thirdly. They belong to schools which, orderly and obedient themselves, understood the law of order in all things. Which is the chief distinction between Art and Rudeness. And the first aim of every great painter, is to express clearly his obedience to the law of Kosmos, Order, or Symmetry.3The onlyperfectwork of the four[293]I have given, the Titian, binds itself by this symmetry most severely. Absolutely straight lines of screen behind the Madonna’s head,—a dark head on one side, a dark head on the other; a child on one side, a child on the other; a veil falling one way on one side, a scroll curling the other way on the other; a group of leaves in the child’s right hand balanced by another in the Madonna’s left; two opposed sprays of leaves on the table, and the whole clasped by a single cherry. In the Lippi, the symmetry is lateral; the Madonna fronting the group of the child central, with supporting angel on each side. In the Leucothea, the diminishing magnitudes of the attendant goddesses on the right are answered by the diminishing magnitudes from the seated goddess and the child, to the smallest figure at her knee, which clasps both the sides of the chain.Lastly, in the Velasquez, the little pyramid of a child, with her three tassels and central brooch, and a chair on each side of her, would have beentoosymmetrical, but for the interferent light in the dog.I said just now, the Titian was the onlyperfectone of the four. Everything there is done with absolute rightness: and you don’t see how. The hair in the Lippi is too stiff,—in the Velasquez, too slight; and one sees that it is drawn in the one, dashed in the other; but by Titian only, ‘painted’—you don’t know how.I say the Titian is the most perfect. It does not[294]follow that it is the best. There are gifts shown in the others, and feelings, which are not in it; and of which the relative worth may be matter of question. For instance, the Lippi, as I told you before, is a painting wrought in real Religion;—that is to say, in the binding of the heart in obedience to the conceived nature and laws of God.The Titian is wrought in what Mr. Harrison calls the Religion of Humanity: but ought more accurately to call, the Religion of Manity, (for the English use of the word ‘humane’ is continually making him confuse benevolence with religion,)—that is to say, in the binding of the heart in obedience to the nature and laws of Man.And, finally, the Velasquez is wrought in the still more developed Modern Religion of Dogity, or obedience of the heart to the nature and laws of Dog; (the lovely little idol, you observe, dominant on velvet throne, as formerly the Madonna). Of which religion, as faithfully held by the brave British Squire, in its widest Catholic form of horse-and-dog-ity, and passionately and tenderly indulged by the devoted British matron in the sectarian limitation of Lapdogity,—there is more to be told than Velasquez taught, or than we can learn, to-day.[295]NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.I. Affairs of the Company.I leave our accounts now wholly in the hands of Mr. Walker and Mr. Rydings, reserving to myself only the usual—as I understand—and proper functions of Director,—that of spending the Company’s money. I have ordered, as above stated, repairs at Barmouth, which will somewhat exceed our rents, I fancy; and a mineral cabinet for the Museum at Sheffield, in which the minerals are to rest, each in its own little cell, on purple, or otherwise fittingly coloured, velvet of the best. Permission to handle and examine them at ease will be eventually given, as a moral and mineralogical prize to the men who attain a certain proficiency in the two sciences of Mineralogy and Behaviour.Our capital, it will be observed, is increased, by honest gift, this month, to the encouraging amount of £16 16s.;—the iniquitous interest, of which our shareholders get none, I have pretty nearly spent in our new land purchase.Cash Account of St. George’s Company.(From June 15th to Aug. 15th, 1876.)1876.Dr.£s.d.June29.To Mrs. Jane Lisle11030.To,,Chas. Firth110Aug.7.To,,G. No. 50.1010012.To,,Miss Sargood220”Miss Christina Allen22015.To,,Balance due Mr. Ruskin14145£311051876.Cr.£s.d.June 16.By Balance due, Mr. Ruskin31105£31105[296]The Union Bank of London (Chancery Lane Branch) in Account with the St. George’s Fund.1876.Dr.£s.d.March15.To Balance1571110May3.To,,Cash Paid Mr. John Ruskin171106.To,,Ditto draft at Bridgwater (J. Talbot)91939.To,,Ditto draft at Douglas (E.Rydings)24189June9.To,,Ditto Cash50013.To,,Ditto, draft at Bridgwater (F. Talbot)20126”To,,Ditto, draft at Bilston (Wilkins)500017.To,,Ditto, Cash2000July6.To,,Dividend on £8000 Consols118100£424341876.Cr.£s.d.July28.By Cheque to Mr. John Ruskin33000Aug.15.To Balance9434£42434II. Affairs of the Master.It was not my fault, but my printers’ (who deserve raps for it), that mine came before the Company’s in last Fors.4It is, I think, now time to state, in general comment on my monotonous account, that the current expenses recorded in the bills of Jackson, Kate, Downs, and David, represent for the most part sums spent for the maintenance or comfort of others; and that I could if need were, for my own part, be utterly at ease in the sunny parlour of a village inn, with no more carriage or coachman than my own limbs,—no more service than a civil traveller’s proper share,—and the blessedness of freedom from responsibility from everything. To which condition, if I ever reduce myself by my extravagance, and, (indeed, just after paying my good Mr. Ellis for[297]thirteenth-century MSS.,5etc., a hundred and forty pounds, I am in treaty to-day with Mr. Quaritch for another, which he says is charged at the very lowest penny at three hundred and twenty)—it will be simply to me only occasion for the loadless traveller’s song; but as it would be greatly inconvenient to other people, I don’t at present intend it. Some day, indeed, perhaps I shall begin to turn a penny by my books. The bills drawn by Mr. Burgess represent now the only loss I incur on them.£s.d.Stated Balance, July 15th617113Repayment and other receipts, July and August406651023178Expenses42750Balance, August 15th£596128£s.d.July16.Geoghegan (blue neckties)400”Naval School55017.David6500”Downs250030.Jackson5000”Kate5000Aug.1.Herne Hill ground-rent230014.Burgess400015.Ellis and White14000”Lucy Tovey (gift)1000”Self (chiefly gone in black quartz from St Gothard Tunnel)1500£42750III.“My dear Sir,—I duly received your very kind note referring to the ‘notice to quit’ to Lord Lonsdale’s farmers in West[298]Cumberland, and have delayed to reply till I had made special inquiries, and find that, as a rule, these tenants have no leases, but have held their farms from year to year only.“Formerly, I am told, some had leases; but as these expired they were not renewed, and the supposition now is that all such have run out, and that all now as yearly tenants have had the notice given them simultaneously.“The notice is clearly given to allow a re-valuation to be made; and when the new rents are arranged, it is expected that leases will then be granted, though it is plain to be seen that all the increased prosperity that the prosperity of recent years of the coal and iron industries have caused to farming,may thus be secured to the landholder; and the farmers, with or without leases, but with higher rents, may be left to bear alone the ebb of the tide that is evidently on the turn; and in any or every case, the general public—the consumers of these farmers’ produce—will have to pay the extra rent, whatever it may be, that Lord Lonsdale may see fit to lay upon the land.6“I have been studying this matter—the increase of land-rents—for many years, and consider it is very much to blame for the present high prices of all land produce, and the distress amongst the poorest of our population, as well as being a great hindrance to the carrying out of any schemes that have for their object the application of more of our own labour to our own soil. In[299]a letter to my son a few weeks ago, I ventured to say that the man who was the first to demonstrate by actual experiment that English soil could be made to double or quadruple its produce, would earn the name of a new Columbus, in that he had discovered another America at our own doors. This son, my oldest, having shown a turn for mathematics, I was induced to send to Cambridge, my hope being that a good education might fit him to solve some of the problems that are so pressing us for solution (and which I had been essaying myself in the pamphlet on ‘Labour and Capital’); and as he now, on the completion of his second term, holds the second place in his year at St. John’s, there is a hope that he may take a good place in the mathematical tripos for 1878; and yet, since we got introduced to your books—two years ago—both he and I think he had best, so soon as he completes his course, go into farming; and hence the reference to growing crops that appeared in his letter last week, and which I am most happy to find has met with your approbation.” (Yes;—and I trust with higher approbation than mine.)IV. The following paragraphs from a county paper gladden me exceedingly, by taking from me all merit of originality in any part of the design of the operations of St. George’s Company, while they prove to the most incredulous not only the practicability, but the assured good of such operations, already, as will be seen, carried to triumphant results on a private gentleman’s estate.The ‘Agricultural Gazette’ gives, as one of a series of papers on “Noteworthy Agriculturists,” a sketch of Mr. William Mackenzie, Achandunie, who, acting for Mr. Matheson, has carried out so many improvements on the Ardross estates. The sketch is in the form of an autobiography, which, as the ‘Gazette’ remarks, carries with it a most pleasant impression of[300]directness and simplicity of character no less than of industry, energy, and success. It is accompanied by a portrait of Mr. Mackenzie, which his friends will recognize as a fair likeness. Mr. Mackenzie states that he was born in 1806, in the parish of Urquhart, Ross-shire, where his ancestors had resided for many generations. His father, who occupied a small farm, died about five years ago at the advanced age of ninety. In 1824, he (Mr. William Mackenzie) entered as an apprentice at Belmaduthy7Gardens, and after serving there three years, removed to the nurseries of Dickson and Co., Edinburgh, where he remained only a few months. He then went to the Duke of Buccleuch’s gardens at Dalkeith, serving under Mr. Macdonald, who was in advance of his time as a practical gardener. There he assisted in carrying out the improvements which were made in the gardens and pleasure-grounds. New ranges of hothouses and a fine conservatory were erected, into which the hot-water system of heating was, it is believed, first introduced in Scotland. Next Mr. Mackenzie assisted in laying out gardens and grounds at Barcaldine, the seat of Sir Duncan Campbell, in Argyllshire; and coming in 1835 to Rosehaugh, as head-gardener, forester, and superintendent of estate works, he carried out the construction of new gardens, both at Rosehaugh and Kinlochluichart, and the remodelling of private grounds and approaches. These large gardens at Barcaldine and Rosehaugh were made with great care,especially in selecting and preparing the soilfor the wall andvineryborders,so that after the lapse, in the one case of thirty years, and in the other of forty years, no decay or canker has appeared among the fruit trees.8[301]“In 1847 Mr. Matheson commenced the improvements at Ardross, the property of Alexander Matheson, Esq., M.P. for the county of Ross.“Ardross proper is surrounded by high hills, and with trifling exceptions was in a state of nature, the whole surface of the district being covered with coarse grass and heather, stunted birches, morass or quagmire, and studded with granite boulders drifted from the hills. The place was under sheep and a few black cattle, and, owing to the coarseness of the herbage the cattle were subject to red water.The tenants’ houses were mere hovels, without chimneys, and with little or no glass in the windows. The population of the district of Ardross proper was, in 1847, only 109 souls; and now, in 1875, the population on the same area is 600, and the number of children attending school is about 140.“In giving a summary of the improvements, we will begin with the pleasure-grounds.9They extend to about 800 acres. In forming them, waggons on rails were used for two years in removing knolls, forming terraces, and filling up gullies. The banks of the river and of the burns flowing through the grounds have been planted with upwards of a hundred different varieties of the finest and hardiest ornamental trees that could be procured, from the tulip-tree to the evergreen oak, and from the native pine to the Wellingtonia. Evergreen shrubs cover about 25 acres in detached portions on the banks of the river which flows immediately beneath the castle, as well as on the banks of two romantic burns, with beautiful cascades, and in ravines. The garden is enclosed with a brick-lined wall, and so boggy was the site that the foundation of the wall is more than 6 feet below[302]the sills of some of the doors. The south side is enclosed by a terrace wall 12 feet high, and the north wall is covered with glass, which includes vineries, conservatory, and orchard houses, besides a range of pits, all heated with water.The soil of the garden was prepared and carted a considerable distance,10as there was none to be got on the site.“Upwards of 5000 acres of moor ground have been planted, chiefly with Scotch fir and larch, the thinnings of which are now being shipped for pit props, the plants of the oldest woods only having been taken out of the nursery in 1847.“The extent of arable land may be best explained by stating that there are twenty-seven farms with thrashing mills, paying rents from £50 to £800 each; and upwards of a hundred ploughs are used in cultivating the lands improved. The steam plough is also to be seen at work on some of the farms.” (St. George does not, however, propose entertaining the curious spectator in this manner.) “Cattle reared on the reclaimed land have taken prizes at the Highland Society’s Shows, and at all local shows; and for cereals and green crops, they will bear a favourable comparison with any part of Scotland.“At one of the detached properties, great care had to be taken, and engineering skill used, in the drainage. Recently a low-lying part of the lands, a mile and a half long by three-quarters broad, was a mixture of the lower stratum of peaty bog, marsh, and spouty sand, charged with ochrey-coloured water, impregnated with sulphur and saltpetre. Attempts made by former occupants to drain this place were fruitless, from want of depth and proper outfall. We found all the pipes in their drains completely choked by deposited ochrey matter. The[303]whole subsoil was running sand. In order to make the drainage perfect, a main leading drain was made, 800 yards long, and in some places 8 feet deep, in which were laid ‘spigot and faucet,’ vitrified pipes 10 to 15 inches in diameter, jointed with cement to prevent sand from getting in, with junctions to receive pipes of smaller sizes, from 10 inches down to 6 inches. Minor drains are from 3½ to 4 feet deep, with tiles of 2 to 4 inch bore, the smaller sizes having collars on the joints. Large stone cisterns are formed to receive the silt, and ventilating shafts with iron gratings are built to give circulation of air. By these means the whole flat is drained effectually,and where bog rushes were the prevailing produce, crops of the richest wheat now grow.The stunted herbage and water were so poisonous that black cattle were known to have turned gray in a season (?).11“More than fifty miles of private roads have been made, and twelve miles of walks through the pleasure-grounds. One walk is six miles continuous, along the windings of fine scenery of the Alness. Upwards of forty miles of stone dykes and eighty of wire fences have been erected, enclosing the arable land and plantations.“For twenty years from three to four hundred men were employed; two hundred of them lived in a square of barracks for nearly eleven years,and so orderly were they that the services of a policeman were never required. There are still a number of men employed, but the improvements are now coming to a close.“All the assistance I had in the engineering and planning was[304]that of a young man only seventeen years old when the works were begun, and we never had occasion to employ a man for a single day re-doing work.“I may further add that I have now the great pleasure of seeing my liberal employer reletting all his farms on the Ardross estate to the same tenants, on a second nineteen years’ lease,” (at increased rents, of course, my friend?) “the second leases having been renewed between two and three years before the expiry of the previous leases, and none of the farms were ever advertised.“I cannot leave this part of the present brief sketch without noticing a feature in the important work so successfully carried out by my enlightened employer, and one which cannot fail to be a source of great satisfaction to himself. Among the first things he did was to establish a school in the district, with a most efficient teacher, and the result is that sons of the small farmers and labourers are now in respectable positions in various walks of life. They are to be found in the capacities of gardeners, artizans, and merchants, students of law, medicine, and divinity. One of them, Donald Ross, carried the Queen’s prize of £100 in the University, and is now one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. Another is the chief constable of the county. Others are in the colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and America, all doing well;and out of hundreds working for themselves, to my knowledge, not one has gone astray.12“I will now advert to the improvements on the west coast estates. A mansion-house was built in the parish of Kintail, with pleasure-grounds and gardens,the former being chiefly reclaimed from the sea. Two islands, which were surrounded by water 11 feet deep on the shore side, are now part of the lawn, the intervening spaces having been filled up by the removal of a hill of rotten rock.[305]This house is let to a shooting tenant. The garden is excellent for fruit, including peaches, nectarines, and apricots, which come to perfection. At Duncraig, recently, a new mansion-house has been built, with all the modern appliances. New gardens have also been made at Duncraig, the site of which was originally a narrow gully running between high ridges of rock. The gardens are upwards of two acres within the walls. The soil is composed of virgin soil and turfy loam, the whole having been carted a considerable distance. The gardens were completed in 1871, and the different kinds of fruit trees, including pears, peaches, and apricots, are now bearing.“Duncraig is rarely to be surpassed in scenery and beauty. The view is extensive, embracing the Cuchullin hills in Skye,” (etc., etc.) “There are two fresh-water lakes within the grounds, one covering thirty-seven acres, and the other about sixty acres, abounding with excellent trout and char. One of them supplies Duncraig House with water, having a fall of about 300 feet. The pipe in its course supplies the gardens; the livery stables and laundry have also connections for applying hose in cases of fire.“The conformation of the ground is a mingling of winding valleys with high rock hills, on which grow natural wood, such as birch, oak, ash, and mountain ash. Several of the valleys have been improved and laid out under permanent pasture, making the landscape, as seen from the front of the house, with wood, rock, and winding grassy bay, very picturesque.“There are twelve miles of private drives and walks—miles of them cut out of the solid rock, and in some places in the face of precipices 100 feet sheer up above the sea. A home-farm is in course of being improved at Achandarroch, a mile south of Duncraig House.”The ‘Gazette’ adds: Mr. Mackenzie himself farms some of the land which he has reclaimed, and nowhere probably is there a better example of what is possible in the way of agricultural improvement under a northern climate. Excellent crops of[306]barley, clover, wheat, and roots are grown where nothing but a marshy wilderness once existed. Here obviously are the circumstances and the experience which should guide and stimulate the efforts of estate owners and improvers in the way of the reclamation of land which is now waste and worthless.“Holme Head, Carlisle,“July 6th, 1875.“Dear Sir,—When I read the number of ‘Fors’ for last April, and came to your account of the rose-leaf cutting bees, I recollected that I had seen one of these bees making its fragmentary cell in a hole in a brick wall, and that I had often seen the remnants of the cut leaves; but I never had a chance of watching them when at work till last week; and thinking the result may be interesting to you, and may correct the omission you refer to at the foot of page 104 in the April ‘Fors,’ I take the liberty to send them to you.“I had the opportunity of seeing a great many bees—often half a dozen together—at work upon a solitary dog-rose in front of a house at a small watering-place (Silloth), and I observed that they cut various shapes at different times. I picked off a great many of the leaves that they had been at, and send you herewith one or two specimens. I find that these have occasionally cut through the midrib of the leaf; but this is a rare exception. I found they carried the cuttings to some adjoining sand-hills, where they had bored small holes in the sand; and in these they built their leaf-cells. The pollen in these cells was not purple, but yellow, and may have been gathered from the Hawkweed which covers the banks where their nests are made.“Since we came home, I have found some more leaves in my own garden similarly cut. The leaves I find to be cut in this way are the rose, French bean, and young laburnum.“Yours truly,“W. Lattimer.”[307]V. Part of a letter from the lady who sent me Helix virgata:—“We live in a poor neighbourhood, and I have come to know the history of many poor working people lately; and I want to understand so much about it, even more than I used to long to understand the mysterious life of shells and flowers. Why aren’t there public baths, etc., for children as much as public schools? They want washing more than teaching. ‘Hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and bodies washed in pure water,’is continually sounding in my ears.” (Well—why don’t you go and wash some, then?)“A poor woman, whose father was a West Country carrier,” (very good, but what isshe?—the gist of the story depends on that: at present it’s like one of those French twisty Bulimi, with no beginning to it,) “was so delighted the other day to find we knew the ‘West Country;’ and when I was saying something about our intending to take the children down in May to pick cowslips, her face gleamed with delight as she said, ‘Oh, the years since I’ve seen a cowslip!’ We used to make ‘tisties’ ” (twisties?) “of them, and it sent a thrill of remembrance through me of my own birthday treats, and cowslip-ball days.“But I’m so glad you like the shells. No, thereisnothing about vegetables in the word Bulimus; but ‘empty-bellied’ generally is hungry, and hungry generally eats a great deal when opportunity offers. Now these ‘Bulimi’ eat a great deal, (ofvegetables, it happens,) so I suppose some one who named them thought they must be very hungry or ‘empty-bellied.’ That’s the way I read the story.” Well, it’s very accommodating and ingenious of you to read it that way; but many snails, thrushes, blackbirds, or old gentlemen of my acquaintance who ‘eat a great deal,’ appear to me more suggestive of the epithet ‘full-’ than ‘empty-’—waist-coated, shall we say?[308]VI. Week’s Diary of a Companion of St. George:—“First day.—Received from Sheffield a dainty ‘well-poised little hammer’ and three sharp-pointed little chisels: felt quite cheerful about porphyry-cutting.“Second day.—Sent to the village in the morning for a slab of freestone; employed man in the afternoon to chisel a hole in it, and to fix the porphyry therein with plaster-of-Paris; drew a straight line, thinking it wiser not to begin with an asterisk; turned the points of two chisels without making the least impression on my line;—the process turned out to be skating, not engraving. Tried the third chisel, and, after diligent efforts, made a cut equal in depth to about two grains of sand. This is the Hamite bondage of art. Felt an increasing desire that the Master should try it, and a respect for the ancient Egyptians. Bore patiently the scoffs of the Amorites.“Third day.—Sent chisel to the village to be hardened. Was recommended a lead hammer. Finally, a friend went to the village and brought back with him an iron hammer and two shorter chisels. Was asked by an Amorite gardener how I was ‘getting on’—unconcealed pleasure on his part to hear that I was not getting on at all. Later, accomplished a beautifully irregular star-fish, which looksmashed outrather thancut, not the least like ‘sharp cliff-edged harbours,’ as the Master kindly supposes. I begin to feel for the ancient Egyptians: they must have got a great deal of porphyry-dust into their eyes. I shall rise in the morning to dulled points and splintered chisels; but ‘whenyou have cut your asterisk, you will know,’ etc., and this is not the voice of a syren, (see ‘Eagle’s Nest,’) but of my honoured Master.… A terrible suspicion occurs to me that he thought no one would or could cut it! Obedience is a fine thing! How it works in the midst of difficulties, dust, and worst of all—doubt!“Fourth day.—I think porphyry-cutting is delightful work: it[309]is true that I have not done any to-day, but I have had my chisels sharpened, and two new ones have arrived from the blacksmith this evening, made out of old files. Also, I have covered my chisels with pretty blue paper, and my hammer with blue-and-white ribbon. I feel the importance of the step gained. Surely I may rest righteously after such labour. If they sing ‘From Egypt lately come,’ in church, I shall think it very personal.“Fifth day.—My piece of porphyry is now enriched by a second star-fish, with a little more backbone in it, and two dividing lines. I worked on the lawn this morning, under thechestnuttree;—the derision of the Amorite gardener (who was mowing the grasswith a scythe) was manifested by the remark ‘Isthat-tall!’ I told him about the Egyptian tombs, but he probably thinks me mildly insane; he however suggested a flat edge instead of a point to a chisel, and I will try it.“Sixth day.—Had lead hammer cast, and waited for chisel.“Seventh day.—With third hammer and seventh chisel will surely charm the porphyry.“But, no! my latest asterisk is jagged in outline instead of sharp. I wonder what attempts others have made. Any one living in or near a blacksmith’s shop would have an advantage, for the chisels are always wanting hardening, or rectifying in some way; and my blue papers soon disappeared. If obedience for the sake of obedience is angelic, I must be an exalted creature. One Amorite’s suggestion was, ‘You would do a deal better with a softer material.’ This was the voice of the tempter.“What is gained?—(besides a lifelong affection for porphyry)—a knowledge of one more thing that I cannotdo; an admiration (to a certain extent) of those who could do it; and a wonder as to what the Master will require next of (amongst others) his faithful and obedient disciple.”[310]VII. Portion of valuable letter from Mr. Sillar:—“Kingswood Lodge, Lee Green, S.E.“August 7th, 1876.“My dear Mr. Ruskin,—It may interest your correspondent, ‘A Reader of Fors,’ and possibly yourself also, to know that interested persons have altered old John Wesley’s rules to suit modern ideas.“Rules of the Methodist Societies (Tyerman’s Life and Times of Wesley, p. 431).“Rule.—Leader to receive once a week what members are willing to give towardsrelief of the poor.“Altered to ‘support of the Gospel.’“Going to lawforbidden, is altered to ‘brothergoing to law withbrother.’“Original Rule.—The giving or taking things on usury, the words have been added, ‘that is, unlawful interest.’“Mr. Tyerman remarks, ‘the curious reader will forgive these trifles.’“I for one do not at all feel disposed to do so.”(Nor does St. George; nor has he either leave, or hope, to say, “God forgive them.”)[311]

I have just been down to Barmouth to see the tenants on the first bit of ground,—noble crystalline rock, I am thankful to say,—possessed by St. George in the island.

I find the rain coming through roofs, and the wind through walls, more than I think proper, and have ordered repairs; and for some time to come, the little rents of these cottages will be spent entirely in the bettering of them, or in extending some garden ground, fenced with furze hedge against the west wind by the most ingenious of our tenants.

And in connection with this first—however small—beginning under my own eyes of St. George’s work,—(already some repairs had been made by my direction, under the superintendence of the donor of the land, Mrs. Talbot, before I could go to see the place)—I must state again clearly our St. George’s principle of rent. It is taken first as the acknowledgment[276]of the authority of the Society over the land, and in the amount judged by the Master to be just, according to the circumstances of the person and place, for the tenant to pay as a contribution to the funds of the Society. The tenant has no claim to the return of the rent in improvements on his ground or his house; and I order the repairs at Barmouth as part of the Company’s general action, not as return of the rent to the tenant. The reader will thus see that our so-called ‘rents’ are in fact taxes laid on the tenants for the advancement of the work of the Company. And all so-called rents are, in like manner, taxes laid on the labourer for the advancement of the work of his landlord. If that work be beneficial, on the whole, to the estate, and of all who live on it, the rents are on a right footing; but if they are abstracted by the landlord to his own private uses, he is merely another form of the old mediæval Knight of Evilstone, living as hawk in eyrie.

It chanced, while I set this work on foot at Barmouth, that a paragraph was sent me out of a Carlisle paper, giving the information that all Lord Lonsdale’s tenants have received notice to quit, that the farms might be re-valued. I requested my correspondent to ascertain for me the manner of the holdings on Lord Lonsdale’s estates;—his reply is the third article in our correspondence this month, and I beg to recommend it to the reader’s most earnest attention. What it says of[277]rents, with the exception indicated in my note, is right; and cannot be more tersely or clearly expressed. What it says of ground-produce is only partially right. To discover another America at our own doors would not be any advantage to us;—nor even to make England bigger. We have no business to want England to be bigger, any more than the world to be bigger. The question is not, forus, how much land God ought to have given us; but to fill the land Hehasgiven us, with the wisest and best inhabitants we can. I could give a plan, if I chose, with great ease, for the maintenance of a greatly increased quantity of inhabitants, on iron scaffolding, by pulverizing our mountains, and strewing the duly pulverized and, by wise medical geology, drugged, materials, over the upper stages; carrying on our present ingenious manufactures in the dark lower stories. But the arrangement, even if it could be at once achieved, would be of no advantage to England.

Whereas St. George’s arrangements, which are to take the hills, streams, and fields that God has made for us; to keep them as lovely, pure, and orderly as we can;1to gather their carefully cultivated fruit in due season; and if our children then multiply so that we cannot feed them, to seek other lands to cultivate in like manner,—these arrangements, I repeat, will be found[278]very advantageous indeed, as they always have been; wheresoever even in any minor degree enforced. In some happy countries they have been so, many a long year already; and the following letter from a recent traveller in one of them, may further illustrate the description given in a Fors of early date, of the felicity verily and visibly to be secured by their practice.

“Salzburg,July 30, 1876.“Dear Professor Ruskin,—I have long intended to write to you, but the mountain of matters I had to tell you has increased till Pelion is piled upon Ossa within my mind, and so I must confine myself to one or two points. In the Black Forest, and more especially in remote mountain valleys of Tyrol, I have found the people living more or less according to principles laid down for the Company of St. George. I have seen the rules so much decried, and even ridiculed, in England, wrought into the whole life of the people. One may still find villages and communes where lawsuits are impossible—a head-man of their own deciding all disputes; where the simplest honesty and friendliness are all but universal, and the stranger is taken in only in the better sense of the phrase; where the nearest approach to steam power is the avalanche of early summer; where there are no wheeled vehicles, and all burthens are carried on the backs of men and mules,” (my dear friend, I really don’t want people to do without[279]donkey-carts, or pony-chaises; nay, I was entirely delighted at Dolgelly, the other day, to meet a four-in-hand coach—driven by the coachman’s daughter;) “where rich and poor must fare alike on the simple food and cheap but sound wine of the country; where the men still carve wood, and the women spin and weave, during the long hours of winter; and where the folk still take genuine delight in picturesque dress, and daily church-going, and have not reduced both to the dreary felon’s uniform of English respectability. With these unconscious followers of Ruskin, and Companions of St. George, I formed deep friendships; and for me, if I ever revisit the wild recesses of the Œtzthal, it will almost be like going amongst my own people and to my own home. Indeed, wherever I left the beaten track of tourists, and the further I left it, so did the friendliness of my entertainers increase. It was evident they regarded me not as a mere purse-bearing animal, but as an argosy of quite a different sort—a human spirit coming from afar, from a land ‘belonging,’ as one of them conjectured, ‘to Spain,’ and laden with all kinds of new knowledge and strange ideas, of which they would gladly have some share. And so towards the close of a dinner, or supper, the meek-eyed hostess would come and sit beside me, hoping I had enjoyed a ‘happy meal;’ and after a complimentary sip from my glass, ask me all sorts of delightful and simple questions about myself, and my family, and my country.[280]Or the landlord would come sometimes,—alas, at the very beginning of a meal,—and from huge pipe bowl, wonderfully painted with Crucifixion or Madonna, blow clouds of anything but incense smoke. But the intention of honouring and amusing me were none the less apparent.”

“Salzburg,July 30, 1876.

“Dear Professor Ruskin,—I have long intended to write to you, but the mountain of matters I had to tell you has increased till Pelion is piled upon Ossa within my mind, and so I must confine myself to one or two points. In the Black Forest, and more especially in remote mountain valleys of Tyrol, I have found the people living more or less according to principles laid down for the Company of St. George. I have seen the rules so much decried, and even ridiculed, in England, wrought into the whole life of the people. One may still find villages and communes where lawsuits are impossible—a head-man of their own deciding all disputes; where the simplest honesty and friendliness are all but universal, and the stranger is taken in only in the better sense of the phrase; where the nearest approach to steam power is the avalanche of early summer; where there are no wheeled vehicles, and all burthens are carried on the backs of men and mules,” (my dear friend, I really don’t want people to do without[279]donkey-carts, or pony-chaises; nay, I was entirely delighted at Dolgelly, the other day, to meet a four-in-hand coach—driven by the coachman’s daughter;) “where rich and poor must fare alike on the simple food and cheap but sound wine of the country; where the men still carve wood, and the women spin and weave, during the long hours of winter; and where the folk still take genuine delight in picturesque dress, and daily church-going, and have not reduced both to the dreary felon’s uniform of English respectability. With these unconscious followers of Ruskin, and Companions of St. George, I formed deep friendships; and for me, if I ever revisit the wild recesses of the Œtzthal, it will almost be like going amongst my own people and to my own home. Indeed, wherever I left the beaten track of tourists, and the further I left it, so did the friendliness of my entertainers increase. It was evident they regarded me not as a mere purse-bearing animal, but as an argosy of quite a different sort—a human spirit coming from afar, from a land ‘belonging,’ as one of them conjectured, ‘to Spain,’ and laden with all kinds of new knowledge and strange ideas, of which they would gladly have some share. And so towards the close of a dinner, or supper, the meek-eyed hostess would come and sit beside me, hoping I had enjoyed a ‘happy meal;’ and after a complimentary sip from my glass, ask me all sorts of delightful and simple questions about myself, and my family, and my country.[280]Or the landlord would come sometimes,—alas, at the very beginning of a meal,—and from huge pipe bowl, wonderfully painted with Crucifixion or Madonna, blow clouds of anything but incense smoke. But the intention of honouring and amusing me were none the less apparent.”

With my friend’s pleasant days among this wise and happy people, I will forthwith compare the very unpleasant day I spent myself on my journey to Barmouth, among unwise and wretched ones; one incident occurring in it being of extreme significance. I had driven from Brantwood in early morning down the valley of the Crake, and took train first at the Ulverston station, settling myself in the corner of a carriage next the sea, for better prospect thereof. In the other corner was a respectable, stolid, middle-aged man reading his paper.

I had left my Coniston lake in dashing ripples under a south wind, thick with rain; but the tide lay smooth and silent along the sands; melancholy in absolute pause of motion, nor ebb nor flow distinguishable;—here and there, among the shelves of grey shore, a little ruffling of their apparent pools marked stray threadings of river-current.

At Grange, talking loud, got in two young coxcombs; who reclined themselves on the opposite cushions. One had a thin stick, with which, in a kind of St. Vitus’s dance, partly affectation of nonchalance, partly real fever[281]produced by the intolerable idleness of his mind and body, he rapped on the elbow of his seat, poked at the button-holes of the window strap, and switched his boots, or the air, all the way from Grange to the last station before Carnforth,—he and his friend talking yacht and regatta, listlessly;—the St. Vitus’s, meantime, dancing one expressing his opinion that “the most dangerous thing to do on these lakes was going before the wind.” The respectable man went on reading his paper, without notice of them. None of the three ever looked out of the windows at sea or shore. There was not much to look at, indeed, through the driving, and gradually closer-driven, rain,—except the drifting about of the seagulls, and their quiet dropping into the pools, their wings kept open for an instant till their breasts felt the water well; then closing their petals of white light, like suddenly shut water flowers.

The two regatta men got out, in drenching rain, on the coverless platform at the station before Carnforth, and all the rest of us at Carnforth itself, to wait for the up train. The shed on the up-line side, even there, is small, in which a crowd of third-class passengers were packed close by the outside drip. I did not see one, out of some twenty-five or thirty persons, tidily dressed, nor one with a contented and serenely patient look. Lines of care, of mean hardship, of comfortless submission, of gnawing anxiety, or ill-temper, characterized every face.[282]

The train came up, and my poor companions were shuffled into it speedily, in heaps. I found an empty first-class carriage for myself: wondering how long universal suffrage would allow itself to be packed away in heaps, for my convenience.

At Lancaster, a father and daughter got in; presumably commercial. Father stoutly built and firm-featured, sagacious and cool. The girl hard and common; well dressed, except that her hat was cocked too high on her hair. They both read papers all the way to Warrington. I was not myself employed much better; the incessant rain making the windows a mere wilderness of dirty dribblings; and neither Preston nor Wigan presenting anything lively to behold, I had settled myself to Mrs. Brown on Spelling Bees, (an unusually forced and poor number of Mrs. Brown, by the way).

I had to change at Warrington for Chester. The weather bettered a little, while I got a cup of tea and slice of bread in the small refreshment room; contemplating, the while, in front of me, the panels of painted glass on its swinging doors, which represented two troubadours, in broadly striped blue and yellow breeches, purple jackets, and plumed caps; with golden-hilted swords, and enormous lyres. Both had soft curled moustaches, languishing eyes, open mouths, and faultless legs. Meanwhile, lounged at the counter behind me, much bemused in beer, a perfect example of the special type of youthful blackguard now developing generally[283]in England; more or less blackly pulpous and swollen in all the features, and with mingled expression of intense grossness and intense impudence,—half pig, half jackdaw.

There got in with me, when the train was ready, a middle-class person of commercial-traveller aspect, who had possessed himself of a ‘Graphic’ from the news-boy; and whom I presently forgot, in examining the country on a line new to me, which became quickly, under gleams of broken sunlight, of extreme interest. Azure-green fields of deep corn; undulations of sandstone hill, with here and there a broken crag at the edge of a cutting; presently the far glittering of the Solway-like sands of Dee, and rounded waves of the Welsh hills on the southern horizon, formed a landscape more fresh and fair than I have seen for many a day, from any great line of English rail. When I looked back to my fellow-traveller, he was sprawling all his length on the cushion of the back seat, with his boots on his ‘Graphic,’—not to save the cushions assuredly, but in the foul modern carelessness of everything which we have ‘done with’ for the moment;—his face clouded with sullen thought, as of a person helplessly in difficulty, and not able to give up thinking how to avoid the unavoidable.

In a minute or two more I found myself plunged into the general dissolution and whirlpool of porters, passengers, and crook-boned trucks, running round corners[284]against one’s legs, of the great Chester station. A simply-dressed upper-class girl of sixteen or seventeen, strictly and swiftly piloting her little sister through the populace, was the first human creature I had yet seen, on whom sight could rest without pain. The rest of the crowd was a mere dismal fermentation of the Ignominious.

The train to Ruabon was crowded, and I was obliged to get into a carriage with two cadaverous sexagenarian spinsters, who had been keeping the windows up, all but a chink, for fear a drop of rain or breath of south wind should come in, and were breathing the richest compound of products of their own indigestion. Pretending to be anxious about the construction of the train, I got the farther window down, and my body well out of it; then put it only half-way up when the train left, and kept putting my head out without my hat; so as, if possible, to impress my fellow-passengers with the imminence of a collision, which could only be averted by extreme watchfulness on my part. Then requesting, with all the politeness I could muster, to be allowed to move a box with which they had occupied the corner-seat—“that I might sit face to the air”—I got them ashamed to ask that the window might be shut up again; but they huddled away into the opposite corner to make me understand how they suffered from the draught. Presently they got out two bags of blue grapes, and[285]ate away unanimously, availing themselves of my open window to throw out rolled-up pips and skins.

General change, to my extreme relief, as to their’s, was again required at Ruabon, effected by a screwing backwards and forwards, for three-quarters of an hour, of carriages which one was expecting every five minutes to get into; and which were puffed and pushed away again the moment one opened a door, with loud calls of ‘Stand back there.’ A group of half a dozen children, from eight to fourteen—the girls all in straw hats, with long hanging scarlet ribands—were more or less pleasant to see meanwhile; and sunshine through the puffs of petulant and cross-purposed steam, promised a pleasant run to Llangollen.

I had only the conventional ‘business man with a paper’ for this run; and on his leaving the carriage at Llangollen, was just closing the door, thinking to have both windows at command, when my hand was stayed by the father of a family of four children, who, with their mother and aunt, presently filled the carriage, the children fitting or scrambling in anywhere, with expansive kicks and lively struggles. They belonged to the lower middle-class; the mother an ideal of the worthy commonplace, evidently hard put to it to make both ends meet, and wholly occupied in family concerns; her face fixed in the ignoble gravity of virtuous persons to whom their own troublesome households have become monasteries. The father, slightly[286]more conscious of external things, submitting benevolently to his domestic happiness out on its annual holiday. The children ugly, fidgety, and ill-bred, but not unintelligent,—full of questionings, ‘when’ they were to get here, or there? how many rails there were on the line; which side the station was on, and who was to meet them. In such debate, varied by bodily contortions in every direction, they contrived to pass the half-hour which took us through the vale of Llangollen, past some of the loveliest brook and glen scenery in the world. But neither the man, the woman, nor any one of the children, looked out of the window once, the whole way.

They got out at Corwen, leaving me to myself for the run past Bala lake and down the Dolgelly valley; but more sorrowful than of late has been my wont, in the sense of my total isolation from the thoughts and ways of the present English people. For I was perfectly certain that among all the crowd of living creatures whom I had that day seen,—scarlet ribands and all,—there was not one to whom I could have spoken a word on any subject interesting to me, which would have been intelligible to them.

But the first broad sum of fact, for the sake of which I have given this diary, is that among certainly not less than some seven or eight hundred people, seen by me in the course of this day, I saw not one happy face, and several hundreds of entirely miserable ones.[287]The second broad sum of fact is, that out of the few,—not happy,—but more or less spirited and complacent faces I saw, among the lower and the mercantile classes, what life or spirit they had depended on a peculiar cock-on-a-dunghill character of impudence, which meant a total inability to conceive any good or lovely thing in this world or any other: and the third sum of fact is, that in this rich England I saw only eight out of eight hundred persons gracefully dressed, and decently mannered. But the particular sign, and prophetic vision of the day, to me, was the man lying with his boots on his ‘Graphic.’ There is a long article in the ‘Monetary Gazette,’ sent me this morning, on the folly of the modern theory that the nation is suffering from ‘over-production.’ The writer is quite correct in his condemnation of the fallacy in question; but it has not occurred to him, nor to any other writer that I know of on such matters, to consider whether we may not possibly be suffering from over-destruction. If you use a given quantity of steam power and human ingenuity to produce your ‘Graphic’ in the morning, and travel from Warrington to Chester with your boots upon it in the afternoon,—Is the net result, production, my dear editor? The net result is labour with wearinessA.M.,—idleness with disgustP.M.,—and nothing to eat next day. And do not think our Warrington friend other than a true type of your modern British employer of industry. The universal British public has[288]no idea of any other use of art, or industry, than he! It reclines everlastingly with its boots on its ‘Graphic.’ ‘To-morrow there will be another,—what use is there in the old?’ Think of the quantity of energy used in the ‘production’ of the daily works of the British press? The first necessity of our lives in the morning,—old rags in the evening! Or the annual works of the British naval architect? The arrow of the Lord’s deliverance in January, and old iron in June! The annual industry of the European soldier,—of the European swindler,—of the European orator,—will you tell me, good Mr. Editor, what it is that they produce? Will you calculate for me, how much of all thatis, they destroy?

But even of what we do produce, under some colour or fancy, of service to humanity,—How much of itisof any service to humanity, good Mr. Editor? Here is a little bit of a note bearing on the matter, written last Christmas in a fit of incontrollable provocation at a Christian correspondent’s drawl of the popular sentiment, “living is so very expensive, you know!”

Why, of course it is, living as you do, in a saucepan full of steam, with no potatoes in it!

Here is the first economical fact I have been trying to teach, these fifteen years; and can’t get it, yet, into the desperate, leathern-skinned, death-helmeted skull of this wretched England—till Jael-Atropos drive it down, through skull and all, into the ground;—that you can’t[289]have bread without corn, nor milk without kine; and that being dragged about the country behind kettles won’t grow corn on it; and speculating in stocks won’t feed mutton on it; and manufacturing steel pens, and scrawling lies with them, won’t clothe your backs or fill your bellies, though you scrawl England as black with ink as you have strewed her black with cinders.

Now look here: I am writing in a friend’s house in a lovely bit of pasture country, surrounding what was once a bright bit of purple and golden heath—inlaid as gorse and heather chose to divide their possession of it; and is now a dusty wilderness of unlet fashionable villas, bricks, thistles, and crockery. My friend has a good estate, and lets a large farm; but he can’t have cream to his tea, and has ‘Dorset’ butter.2If he ever gets any of these articles off his own farm, they are brought to him from London, having been carried there that they may pay toll to the railroad company once as they go up, and again as they come down; and have two chances of helping to smash an excursion train.

Meantime, at the apothecary’s shop in the village, I can buy, besides drugs,—cigars, and stationery; and among other stationery, the ‘College card,’ of “eighteenusefularticles,”—namely, Bohemian glass ruler, Bohemian glass penholder, pen-box with gilt and diapered lid, pen-wiper[290]with a gilt tin fern leaf for ornament, pencil, india-rubber, and twelve steel pens,—all stitched separately and neatly on the card; and the whole array of them to be bought for sixpence.

What times!—what civilization!—what ingenuity!—what cheapness!

Yes; but what does it mean? First, that I, who buy the card, can’t get cream to my tea? And secondly, that the unhappy wretches,—Bohemian and other,—glass blowers, iron diggers, pen manufacturers, and the like,—who have made the eighteen useful articles, have sixpence to divide among them for their trouble! What sort of cream havetheyto their tea?

But the question of questions about it all, is—Are these eighteen articles ‘useful articles’? For what? Here’s a—nominal—‘pencil’ on our ‘College card.’ But not a collegian, that I know of, wants to draw,—and if he did, he couldn’t draw withthisthing, which isnota pencil, but some sand and coal-dust jammed in a stick. The ‘india-rubber’ also, I perceive, is not india-rubber; but a composition for tearing up the surface of paper,—useful only to filthy blunderers; the nasty glass-handled things, which will break if I drop them, and cut the housemaid’s fingers, I shall instantly turn out of the house; the pens, for which I bought the card, will perhaps be useful to me, because I have, to my much misery, writing to do: butyou, happier animals, who may exist without scratching either paper or your[291]heads,—what is the use of them toyou? (N.B.I couldn’t write a word with one of them, after all.)

I must go back to my Warrington friend; for there are more lessons to be received from him. I looked at him, in one sense, not undeferentially. He was, to the extent of his experience, as good a judge of art as I. He knew what his ‘Graphic’ was worth. Pronounced an entirely divine verdict upon it. Put it, beneficently, out of its pictorial pain,—for ever.

Do not think that it is so difficult to know good art from bad. The poorest-minded public cannot rest in its bad possessions,—wants them new, and ever new. I have given my readers, who have trusted me, four art-possessions, which I do not fear their wishing to destroy; and it will be a long while before I wish them to get another. I have too long delayed beginning to tell themwhythey are good; and one of my Sheffield men asked Mr. Swan the other day what I had commended the Leucothea for,—“he couldn’t see anything in it.” To whom the first answer must be—Did you expect to, then? My good manufacturing friend, be assured there was no more thought of pleasingyouwhen Leucothea was carved, than of pleasing—Ganymede, when Rosalind was christened. Some day you will come to “like her name.”

But, whether you ever come to ‘see anything in it’ or not, be assured that this, and the Lippi, and the Titian, and the Velasquez, are, all four, alike in one[292]quality, which you can respect, even if you do not envy. They are work of men doing their best. And whoseprideis in doing their best and most. You modern British workmen’s pride, I find more and more, is in doing ingeniously the worst, and least, you can.

Again: they all four agree in being the work of men trained under true masters, and themselves able to be true masters to others. They belong, therefore, to what are properly called ‘schools’ of art. Whereas your modern British workman recognizes no master; but is, (as the result of his increasing intelligence, according to Mr. Mill,) less and less disposed “to be guided in the way which he should go by any prestige or authority.” The result of which is that every British artist has to find out how to paint as he best can; and usually begins to see his way to it, by the time he is sixty.

Thirdly. They belong to schools which, orderly and obedient themselves, understood the law of order in all things. Which is the chief distinction between Art and Rudeness. And the first aim of every great painter, is to express clearly his obedience to the law of Kosmos, Order, or Symmetry.3The onlyperfectwork of the four[293]I have given, the Titian, binds itself by this symmetry most severely. Absolutely straight lines of screen behind the Madonna’s head,—a dark head on one side, a dark head on the other; a child on one side, a child on the other; a veil falling one way on one side, a scroll curling the other way on the other; a group of leaves in the child’s right hand balanced by another in the Madonna’s left; two opposed sprays of leaves on the table, and the whole clasped by a single cherry. In the Lippi, the symmetry is lateral; the Madonna fronting the group of the child central, with supporting angel on each side. In the Leucothea, the diminishing magnitudes of the attendant goddesses on the right are answered by the diminishing magnitudes from the seated goddess and the child, to the smallest figure at her knee, which clasps both the sides of the chain.

Lastly, in the Velasquez, the little pyramid of a child, with her three tassels and central brooch, and a chair on each side of her, would have beentoosymmetrical, but for the interferent light in the dog.

I said just now, the Titian was the onlyperfectone of the four. Everything there is done with absolute rightness: and you don’t see how. The hair in the Lippi is too stiff,—in the Velasquez, too slight; and one sees that it is drawn in the one, dashed in the other; but by Titian only, ‘painted’—you don’t know how.

I say the Titian is the most perfect. It does not[294]follow that it is the best. There are gifts shown in the others, and feelings, which are not in it; and of which the relative worth may be matter of question. For instance, the Lippi, as I told you before, is a painting wrought in real Religion;—that is to say, in the binding of the heart in obedience to the conceived nature and laws of God.

The Titian is wrought in what Mr. Harrison calls the Religion of Humanity: but ought more accurately to call, the Religion of Manity, (for the English use of the word ‘humane’ is continually making him confuse benevolence with religion,)—that is to say, in the binding of the heart in obedience to the nature and laws of Man.

And, finally, the Velasquez is wrought in the still more developed Modern Religion of Dogity, or obedience of the heart to the nature and laws of Dog; (the lovely little idol, you observe, dominant on velvet throne, as formerly the Madonna). Of which religion, as faithfully held by the brave British Squire, in its widest Catholic form of horse-and-dog-ity, and passionately and tenderly indulged by the devoted British matron in the sectarian limitation of Lapdogity,—there is more to be told than Velasquez taught, or than we can learn, to-day.[295]

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.I. Affairs of the Company.I leave our accounts now wholly in the hands of Mr. Walker and Mr. Rydings, reserving to myself only the usual—as I understand—and proper functions of Director,—that of spending the Company’s money. I have ordered, as above stated, repairs at Barmouth, which will somewhat exceed our rents, I fancy; and a mineral cabinet for the Museum at Sheffield, in which the minerals are to rest, each in its own little cell, on purple, or otherwise fittingly coloured, velvet of the best. Permission to handle and examine them at ease will be eventually given, as a moral and mineralogical prize to the men who attain a certain proficiency in the two sciences of Mineralogy and Behaviour.Our capital, it will be observed, is increased, by honest gift, this month, to the encouraging amount of £16 16s.;—the iniquitous interest, of which our shareholders get none, I have pretty nearly spent in our new land purchase.Cash Account of St. George’s Company.(From June 15th to Aug. 15th, 1876.)1876.Dr.£s.d.June29.To Mrs. Jane Lisle11030.To,,Chas. Firth110Aug.7.To,,G. No. 50.1010012.To,,Miss Sargood220”Miss Christina Allen22015.To,,Balance due Mr. Ruskin14145£311051876.Cr.£s.d.June 16.By Balance due, Mr. Ruskin31105£31105[296]The Union Bank of London (Chancery Lane Branch) in Account with the St. George’s Fund.1876.Dr.£s.d.March15.To Balance1571110May3.To,,Cash Paid Mr. John Ruskin171106.To,,Ditto draft at Bridgwater (J. Talbot)91939.To,,Ditto draft at Douglas (E.Rydings)24189June9.To,,Ditto Cash50013.To,,Ditto, draft at Bridgwater (F. Talbot)20126”To,,Ditto, draft at Bilston (Wilkins)500017.To,,Ditto, Cash2000July6.To,,Dividend on £8000 Consols118100£424341876.Cr.£s.d.July28.By Cheque to Mr. John Ruskin33000Aug.15.To Balance9434£42434II. Affairs of the Master.It was not my fault, but my printers’ (who deserve raps for it), that mine came before the Company’s in last Fors.4It is, I think, now time to state, in general comment on my monotonous account, that the current expenses recorded in the bills of Jackson, Kate, Downs, and David, represent for the most part sums spent for the maintenance or comfort of others; and that I could if need were, for my own part, be utterly at ease in the sunny parlour of a village inn, with no more carriage or coachman than my own limbs,—no more service than a civil traveller’s proper share,—and the blessedness of freedom from responsibility from everything. To which condition, if I ever reduce myself by my extravagance, and, (indeed, just after paying my good Mr. Ellis for[297]thirteenth-century MSS.,5etc., a hundred and forty pounds, I am in treaty to-day with Mr. Quaritch for another, which he says is charged at the very lowest penny at three hundred and twenty)—it will be simply to me only occasion for the loadless traveller’s song; but as it would be greatly inconvenient to other people, I don’t at present intend it. Some day, indeed, perhaps I shall begin to turn a penny by my books. The bills drawn by Mr. Burgess represent now the only loss I incur on them.£s.d.Stated Balance, July 15th617113Repayment and other receipts, July and August406651023178Expenses42750Balance, August 15th£596128£s.d.July16.Geoghegan (blue neckties)400”Naval School55017.David6500”Downs250030.Jackson5000”Kate5000Aug.1.Herne Hill ground-rent230014.Burgess400015.Ellis and White14000”Lucy Tovey (gift)1000”Self (chiefly gone in black quartz from St Gothard Tunnel)1500£42750III.“My dear Sir,—I duly received your very kind note referring to the ‘notice to quit’ to Lord Lonsdale’s farmers in West[298]Cumberland, and have delayed to reply till I had made special inquiries, and find that, as a rule, these tenants have no leases, but have held their farms from year to year only.“Formerly, I am told, some had leases; but as these expired they were not renewed, and the supposition now is that all such have run out, and that all now as yearly tenants have had the notice given them simultaneously.“The notice is clearly given to allow a re-valuation to be made; and when the new rents are arranged, it is expected that leases will then be granted, though it is plain to be seen that all the increased prosperity that the prosperity of recent years of the coal and iron industries have caused to farming,may thus be secured to the landholder; and the farmers, with or without leases, but with higher rents, may be left to bear alone the ebb of the tide that is evidently on the turn; and in any or every case, the general public—the consumers of these farmers’ produce—will have to pay the extra rent, whatever it may be, that Lord Lonsdale may see fit to lay upon the land.6“I have been studying this matter—the increase of land-rents—for many years, and consider it is very much to blame for the present high prices of all land produce, and the distress amongst the poorest of our population, as well as being a great hindrance to the carrying out of any schemes that have for their object the application of more of our own labour to our own soil. In[299]a letter to my son a few weeks ago, I ventured to say that the man who was the first to demonstrate by actual experiment that English soil could be made to double or quadruple its produce, would earn the name of a new Columbus, in that he had discovered another America at our own doors. This son, my oldest, having shown a turn for mathematics, I was induced to send to Cambridge, my hope being that a good education might fit him to solve some of the problems that are so pressing us for solution (and which I had been essaying myself in the pamphlet on ‘Labour and Capital’); and as he now, on the completion of his second term, holds the second place in his year at St. John’s, there is a hope that he may take a good place in the mathematical tripos for 1878; and yet, since we got introduced to your books—two years ago—both he and I think he had best, so soon as he completes his course, go into farming; and hence the reference to growing crops that appeared in his letter last week, and which I am most happy to find has met with your approbation.” (Yes;—and I trust with higher approbation than mine.)IV. The following paragraphs from a county paper gladden me exceedingly, by taking from me all merit of originality in any part of the design of the operations of St. George’s Company, while they prove to the most incredulous not only the practicability, but the assured good of such operations, already, as will be seen, carried to triumphant results on a private gentleman’s estate.The ‘Agricultural Gazette’ gives, as one of a series of papers on “Noteworthy Agriculturists,” a sketch of Mr. William Mackenzie, Achandunie, who, acting for Mr. Matheson, has carried out so many improvements on the Ardross estates. The sketch is in the form of an autobiography, which, as the ‘Gazette’ remarks, carries with it a most pleasant impression of[300]directness and simplicity of character no less than of industry, energy, and success. It is accompanied by a portrait of Mr. Mackenzie, which his friends will recognize as a fair likeness. Mr. Mackenzie states that he was born in 1806, in the parish of Urquhart, Ross-shire, where his ancestors had resided for many generations. His father, who occupied a small farm, died about five years ago at the advanced age of ninety. In 1824, he (Mr. William Mackenzie) entered as an apprentice at Belmaduthy7Gardens, and after serving there three years, removed to the nurseries of Dickson and Co., Edinburgh, where he remained only a few months. He then went to the Duke of Buccleuch’s gardens at Dalkeith, serving under Mr. Macdonald, who was in advance of his time as a practical gardener. There he assisted in carrying out the improvements which were made in the gardens and pleasure-grounds. New ranges of hothouses and a fine conservatory were erected, into which the hot-water system of heating was, it is believed, first introduced in Scotland. Next Mr. Mackenzie assisted in laying out gardens and grounds at Barcaldine, the seat of Sir Duncan Campbell, in Argyllshire; and coming in 1835 to Rosehaugh, as head-gardener, forester, and superintendent of estate works, he carried out the construction of new gardens, both at Rosehaugh and Kinlochluichart, and the remodelling of private grounds and approaches. These large gardens at Barcaldine and Rosehaugh were made with great care,especially in selecting and preparing the soilfor the wall andvineryborders,so that after the lapse, in the one case of thirty years, and in the other of forty years, no decay or canker has appeared among the fruit trees.8[301]“In 1847 Mr. Matheson commenced the improvements at Ardross, the property of Alexander Matheson, Esq., M.P. for the county of Ross.“Ardross proper is surrounded by high hills, and with trifling exceptions was in a state of nature, the whole surface of the district being covered with coarse grass and heather, stunted birches, morass or quagmire, and studded with granite boulders drifted from the hills. The place was under sheep and a few black cattle, and, owing to the coarseness of the herbage the cattle were subject to red water.The tenants’ houses were mere hovels, without chimneys, and with little or no glass in the windows. The population of the district of Ardross proper was, in 1847, only 109 souls; and now, in 1875, the population on the same area is 600, and the number of children attending school is about 140.“In giving a summary of the improvements, we will begin with the pleasure-grounds.9They extend to about 800 acres. In forming them, waggons on rails were used for two years in removing knolls, forming terraces, and filling up gullies. The banks of the river and of the burns flowing through the grounds have been planted with upwards of a hundred different varieties of the finest and hardiest ornamental trees that could be procured, from the tulip-tree to the evergreen oak, and from the native pine to the Wellingtonia. Evergreen shrubs cover about 25 acres in detached portions on the banks of the river which flows immediately beneath the castle, as well as on the banks of two romantic burns, with beautiful cascades, and in ravines. The garden is enclosed with a brick-lined wall, and so boggy was the site that the foundation of the wall is more than 6 feet below[302]the sills of some of the doors. The south side is enclosed by a terrace wall 12 feet high, and the north wall is covered with glass, which includes vineries, conservatory, and orchard houses, besides a range of pits, all heated with water.The soil of the garden was prepared and carted a considerable distance,10as there was none to be got on the site.“Upwards of 5000 acres of moor ground have been planted, chiefly with Scotch fir and larch, the thinnings of which are now being shipped for pit props, the plants of the oldest woods only having been taken out of the nursery in 1847.“The extent of arable land may be best explained by stating that there are twenty-seven farms with thrashing mills, paying rents from £50 to £800 each; and upwards of a hundred ploughs are used in cultivating the lands improved. The steam plough is also to be seen at work on some of the farms.” (St. George does not, however, propose entertaining the curious spectator in this manner.) “Cattle reared on the reclaimed land have taken prizes at the Highland Society’s Shows, and at all local shows; and for cereals and green crops, they will bear a favourable comparison with any part of Scotland.“At one of the detached properties, great care had to be taken, and engineering skill used, in the drainage. Recently a low-lying part of the lands, a mile and a half long by three-quarters broad, was a mixture of the lower stratum of peaty bog, marsh, and spouty sand, charged with ochrey-coloured water, impregnated with sulphur and saltpetre. Attempts made by former occupants to drain this place were fruitless, from want of depth and proper outfall. We found all the pipes in their drains completely choked by deposited ochrey matter. The[303]whole subsoil was running sand. In order to make the drainage perfect, a main leading drain was made, 800 yards long, and in some places 8 feet deep, in which were laid ‘spigot and faucet,’ vitrified pipes 10 to 15 inches in diameter, jointed with cement to prevent sand from getting in, with junctions to receive pipes of smaller sizes, from 10 inches down to 6 inches. Minor drains are from 3½ to 4 feet deep, with tiles of 2 to 4 inch bore, the smaller sizes having collars on the joints. Large stone cisterns are formed to receive the silt, and ventilating shafts with iron gratings are built to give circulation of air. By these means the whole flat is drained effectually,and where bog rushes were the prevailing produce, crops of the richest wheat now grow.The stunted herbage and water were so poisonous that black cattle were known to have turned gray in a season (?).11“More than fifty miles of private roads have been made, and twelve miles of walks through the pleasure-grounds. One walk is six miles continuous, along the windings of fine scenery of the Alness. Upwards of forty miles of stone dykes and eighty of wire fences have been erected, enclosing the arable land and plantations.“For twenty years from three to four hundred men were employed; two hundred of them lived in a square of barracks for nearly eleven years,and so orderly were they that the services of a policeman were never required. There are still a number of men employed, but the improvements are now coming to a close.“All the assistance I had in the engineering and planning was[304]that of a young man only seventeen years old when the works were begun, and we never had occasion to employ a man for a single day re-doing work.“I may further add that I have now the great pleasure of seeing my liberal employer reletting all his farms on the Ardross estate to the same tenants, on a second nineteen years’ lease,” (at increased rents, of course, my friend?) “the second leases having been renewed between two and three years before the expiry of the previous leases, and none of the farms were ever advertised.“I cannot leave this part of the present brief sketch without noticing a feature in the important work so successfully carried out by my enlightened employer, and one which cannot fail to be a source of great satisfaction to himself. Among the first things he did was to establish a school in the district, with a most efficient teacher, and the result is that sons of the small farmers and labourers are now in respectable positions in various walks of life. They are to be found in the capacities of gardeners, artizans, and merchants, students of law, medicine, and divinity. One of them, Donald Ross, carried the Queen’s prize of £100 in the University, and is now one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. Another is the chief constable of the county. Others are in the colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and America, all doing well;and out of hundreds working for themselves, to my knowledge, not one has gone astray.12“I will now advert to the improvements on the west coast estates. A mansion-house was built in the parish of Kintail, with pleasure-grounds and gardens,the former being chiefly reclaimed from the sea. Two islands, which were surrounded by water 11 feet deep on the shore side, are now part of the lawn, the intervening spaces having been filled up by the removal of a hill of rotten rock.[305]This house is let to a shooting tenant. The garden is excellent for fruit, including peaches, nectarines, and apricots, which come to perfection. At Duncraig, recently, a new mansion-house has been built, with all the modern appliances. New gardens have also been made at Duncraig, the site of which was originally a narrow gully running between high ridges of rock. The gardens are upwards of two acres within the walls. The soil is composed of virgin soil and turfy loam, the whole having been carted a considerable distance. The gardens were completed in 1871, and the different kinds of fruit trees, including pears, peaches, and apricots, are now bearing.“Duncraig is rarely to be surpassed in scenery and beauty. The view is extensive, embracing the Cuchullin hills in Skye,” (etc., etc.) “There are two fresh-water lakes within the grounds, one covering thirty-seven acres, and the other about sixty acres, abounding with excellent trout and char. One of them supplies Duncraig House with water, having a fall of about 300 feet. The pipe in its course supplies the gardens; the livery stables and laundry have also connections for applying hose in cases of fire.“The conformation of the ground is a mingling of winding valleys with high rock hills, on which grow natural wood, such as birch, oak, ash, and mountain ash. Several of the valleys have been improved and laid out under permanent pasture, making the landscape, as seen from the front of the house, with wood, rock, and winding grassy bay, very picturesque.“There are twelve miles of private drives and walks—miles of them cut out of the solid rock, and in some places in the face of precipices 100 feet sheer up above the sea. A home-farm is in course of being improved at Achandarroch, a mile south of Duncraig House.”The ‘Gazette’ adds: Mr. Mackenzie himself farms some of the land which he has reclaimed, and nowhere probably is there a better example of what is possible in the way of agricultural improvement under a northern climate. Excellent crops of[306]barley, clover, wheat, and roots are grown where nothing but a marshy wilderness once existed. Here obviously are the circumstances and the experience which should guide and stimulate the efforts of estate owners and improvers in the way of the reclamation of land which is now waste and worthless.“Holme Head, Carlisle,“July 6th, 1875.“Dear Sir,—When I read the number of ‘Fors’ for last April, and came to your account of the rose-leaf cutting bees, I recollected that I had seen one of these bees making its fragmentary cell in a hole in a brick wall, and that I had often seen the remnants of the cut leaves; but I never had a chance of watching them when at work till last week; and thinking the result may be interesting to you, and may correct the omission you refer to at the foot of page 104 in the April ‘Fors,’ I take the liberty to send them to you.“I had the opportunity of seeing a great many bees—often half a dozen together—at work upon a solitary dog-rose in front of a house at a small watering-place (Silloth), and I observed that they cut various shapes at different times. I picked off a great many of the leaves that they had been at, and send you herewith one or two specimens. I find that these have occasionally cut through the midrib of the leaf; but this is a rare exception. I found they carried the cuttings to some adjoining sand-hills, where they had bored small holes in the sand; and in these they built their leaf-cells. The pollen in these cells was not purple, but yellow, and may have been gathered from the Hawkweed which covers the banks where their nests are made.“Since we came home, I have found some more leaves in my own garden similarly cut. The leaves I find to be cut in this way are the rose, French bean, and young laburnum.“Yours truly,“W. Lattimer.”[307]V. Part of a letter from the lady who sent me Helix virgata:—“We live in a poor neighbourhood, and I have come to know the history of many poor working people lately; and I want to understand so much about it, even more than I used to long to understand the mysterious life of shells and flowers. Why aren’t there public baths, etc., for children as much as public schools? They want washing more than teaching. ‘Hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and bodies washed in pure water,’is continually sounding in my ears.” (Well—why don’t you go and wash some, then?)“A poor woman, whose father was a West Country carrier,” (very good, but what isshe?—the gist of the story depends on that: at present it’s like one of those French twisty Bulimi, with no beginning to it,) “was so delighted the other day to find we knew the ‘West Country;’ and when I was saying something about our intending to take the children down in May to pick cowslips, her face gleamed with delight as she said, ‘Oh, the years since I’ve seen a cowslip!’ We used to make ‘tisties’ ” (twisties?) “of them, and it sent a thrill of remembrance through me of my own birthday treats, and cowslip-ball days.“But I’m so glad you like the shells. No, thereisnothing about vegetables in the word Bulimus; but ‘empty-bellied’ generally is hungry, and hungry generally eats a great deal when opportunity offers. Now these ‘Bulimi’ eat a great deal, (ofvegetables, it happens,) so I suppose some one who named them thought they must be very hungry or ‘empty-bellied.’ That’s the way I read the story.” Well, it’s very accommodating and ingenious of you to read it that way; but many snails, thrushes, blackbirds, or old gentlemen of my acquaintance who ‘eat a great deal,’ appear to me more suggestive of the epithet ‘full-’ than ‘empty-’—waist-coated, shall we say?[308]VI. Week’s Diary of a Companion of St. George:—“First day.—Received from Sheffield a dainty ‘well-poised little hammer’ and three sharp-pointed little chisels: felt quite cheerful about porphyry-cutting.“Second day.—Sent to the village in the morning for a slab of freestone; employed man in the afternoon to chisel a hole in it, and to fix the porphyry therein with plaster-of-Paris; drew a straight line, thinking it wiser not to begin with an asterisk; turned the points of two chisels without making the least impression on my line;—the process turned out to be skating, not engraving. Tried the third chisel, and, after diligent efforts, made a cut equal in depth to about two grains of sand. This is the Hamite bondage of art. Felt an increasing desire that the Master should try it, and a respect for the ancient Egyptians. Bore patiently the scoffs of the Amorites.“Third day.—Sent chisel to the village to be hardened. Was recommended a lead hammer. Finally, a friend went to the village and brought back with him an iron hammer and two shorter chisels. Was asked by an Amorite gardener how I was ‘getting on’—unconcealed pleasure on his part to hear that I was not getting on at all. Later, accomplished a beautifully irregular star-fish, which looksmashed outrather thancut, not the least like ‘sharp cliff-edged harbours,’ as the Master kindly supposes. I begin to feel for the ancient Egyptians: they must have got a great deal of porphyry-dust into their eyes. I shall rise in the morning to dulled points and splintered chisels; but ‘whenyou have cut your asterisk, you will know,’ etc., and this is not the voice of a syren, (see ‘Eagle’s Nest,’) but of my honoured Master.… A terrible suspicion occurs to me that he thought no one would or could cut it! Obedience is a fine thing! How it works in the midst of difficulties, dust, and worst of all—doubt!“Fourth day.—I think porphyry-cutting is delightful work: it[309]is true that I have not done any to-day, but I have had my chisels sharpened, and two new ones have arrived from the blacksmith this evening, made out of old files. Also, I have covered my chisels with pretty blue paper, and my hammer with blue-and-white ribbon. I feel the importance of the step gained. Surely I may rest righteously after such labour. If they sing ‘From Egypt lately come,’ in church, I shall think it very personal.“Fifth day.—My piece of porphyry is now enriched by a second star-fish, with a little more backbone in it, and two dividing lines. I worked on the lawn this morning, under thechestnuttree;—the derision of the Amorite gardener (who was mowing the grasswith a scythe) was manifested by the remark ‘Isthat-tall!’ I told him about the Egyptian tombs, but he probably thinks me mildly insane; he however suggested a flat edge instead of a point to a chisel, and I will try it.“Sixth day.—Had lead hammer cast, and waited for chisel.“Seventh day.—With third hammer and seventh chisel will surely charm the porphyry.“But, no! my latest asterisk is jagged in outline instead of sharp. I wonder what attempts others have made. Any one living in or near a blacksmith’s shop would have an advantage, for the chisels are always wanting hardening, or rectifying in some way; and my blue papers soon disappeared. If obedience for the sake of obedience is angelic, I must be an exalted creature. One Amorite’s suggestion was, ‘You would do a deal better with a softer material.’ This was the voice of the tempter.“What is gained?—(besides a lifelong affection for porphyry)—a knowledge of one more thing that I cannotdo; an admiration (to a certain extent) of those who could do it; and a wonder as to what the Master will require next of (amongst others) his faithful and obedient disciple.”[310]VII. Portion of valuable letter from Mr. Sillar:—“Kingswood Lodge, Lee Green, S.E.“August 7th, 1876.“My dear Mr. Ruskin,—It may interest your correspondent, ‘A Reader of Fors,’ and possibly yourself also, to know that interested persons have altered old John Wesley’s rules to suit modern ideas.“Rules of the Methodist Societies (Tyerman’s Life and Times of Wesley, p. 431).“Rule.—Leader to receive once a week what members are willing to give towardsrelief of the poor.“Altered to ‘support of the Gospel.’“Going to lawforbidden, is altered to ‘brothergoing to law withbrother.’“Original Rule.—The giving or taking things on usury, the words have been added, ‘that is, unlawful interest.’“Mr. Tyerman remarks, ‘the curious reader will forgive these trifles.’“I for one do not at all feel disposed to do so.”(Nor does St. George; nor has he either leave, or hope, to say, “God forgive them.”)[311]

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

I. Affairs of the Company.I leave our accounts now wholly in the hands of Mr. Walker and Mr. Rydings, reserving to myself only the usual—as I understand—and proper functions of Director,—that of spending the Company’s money. I have ordered, as above stated, repairs at Barmouth, which will somewhat exceed our rents, I fancy; and a mineral cabinet for the Museum at Sheffield, in which the minerals are to rest, each in its own little cell, on purple, or otherwise fittingly coloured, velvet of the best. Permission to handle and examine them at ease will be eventually given, as a moral and mineralogical prize to the men who attain a certain proficiency in the two sciences of Mineralogy and Behaviour.Our capital, it will be observed, is increased, by honest gift, this month, to the encouraging amount of £16 16s.;—the iniquitous interest, of which our shareholders get none, I have pretty nearly spent in our new land purchase.Cash Account of St. George’s Company.(From June 15th to Aug. 15th, 1876.)1876.Dr.£s.d.June29.To Mrs. Jane Lisle11030.To,,Chas. Firth110Aug.7.To,,G. No. 50.1010012.To,,Miss Sargood220”Miss Christina Allen22015.To,,Balance due Mr. Ruskin14145£311051876.Cr.£s.d.June 16.By Balance due, Mr. Ruskin31105£31105[296]The Union Bank of London (Chancery Lane Branch) in Account with the St. George’s Fund.1876.Dr.£s.d.March15.To Balance1571110May3.To,,Cash Paid Mr. John Ruskin171106.To,,Ditto draft at Bridgwater (J. Talbot)91939.To,,Ditto draft at Douglas (E.Rydings)24189June9.To,,Ditto Cash50013.To,,Ditto, draft at Bridgwater (F. Talbot)20126”To,,Ditto, draft at Bilston (Wilkins)500017.To,,Ditto, Cash2000July6.To,,Dividend on £8000 Consols118100£424341876.Cr.£s.d.July28.By Cheque to Mr. John Ruskin33000Aug.15.To Balance9434£42434II. Affairs of the Master.It was not my fault, but my printers’ (who deserve raps for it), that mine came before the Company’s in last Fors.4It is, I think, now time to state, in general comment on my monotonous account, that the current expenses recorded in the bills of Jackson, Kate, Downs, and David, represent for the most part sums spent for the maintenance or comfort of others; and that I could if need were, for my own part, be utterly at ease in the sunny parlour of a village inn, with no more carriage or coachman than my own limbs,—no more service than a civil traveller’s proper share,—and the blessedness of freedom from responsibility from everything. To which condition, if I ever reduce myself by my extravagance, and, (indeed, just after paying my good Mr. Ellis for[297]thirteenth-century MSS.,5etc., a hundred and forty pounds, I am in treaty to-day with Mr. Quaritch for another, which he says is charged at the very lowest penny at three hundred and twenty)—it will be simply to me only occasion for the loadless traveller’s song; but as it would be greatly inconvenient to other people, I don’t at present intend it. Some day, indeed, perhaps I shall begin to turn a penny by my books. The bills drawn by Mr. Burgess represent now the only loss I incur on them.£s.d.Stated Balance, July 15th617113Repayment and other receipts, July and August406651023178Expenses42750Balance, August 15th£596128£s.d.July16.Geoghegan (blue neckties)400”Naval School55017.David6500”Downs250030.Jackson5000”Kate5000Aug.1.Herne Hill ground-rent230014.Burgess400015.Ellis and White14000”Lucy Tovey (gift)1000”Self (chiefly gone in black quartz from St Gothard Tunnel)1500£42750III.“My dear Sir,—I duly received your very kind note referring to the ‘notice to quit’ to Lord Lonsdale’s farmers in West[298]Cumberland, and have delayed to reply till I had made special inquiries, and find that, as a rule, these tenants have no leases, but have held their farms from year to year only.“Formerly, I am told, some had leases; but as these expired they were not renewed, and the supposition now is that all such have run out, and that all now as yearly tenants have had the notice given them simultaneously.“The notice is clearly given to allow a re-valuation to be made; and when the new rents are arranged, it is expected that leases will then be granted, though it is plain to be seen that all the increased prosperity that the prosperity of recent years of the coal and iron industries have caused to farming,may thus be secured to the landholder; and the farmers, with or without leases, but with higher rents, may be left to bear alone the ebb of the tide that is evidently on the turn; and in any or every case, the general public—the consumers of these farmers’ produce—will have to pay the extra rent, whatever it may be, that Lord Lonsdale may see fit to lay upon the land.6“I have been studying this matter—the increase of land-rents—for many years, and consider it is very much to blame for the present high prices of all land produce, and the distress amongst the poorest of our population, as well as being a great hindrance to the carrying out of any schemes that have for their object the application of more of our own labour to our own soil. In[299]a letter to my son a few weeks ago, I ventured to say that the man who was the first to demonstrate by actual experiment that English soil could be made to double or quadruple its produce, would earn the name of a new Columbus, in that he had discovered another America at our own doors. This son, my oldest, having shown a turn for mathematics, I was induced to send to Cambridge, my hope being that a good education might fit him to solve some of the problems that are so pressing us for solution (and which I had been essaying myself in the pamphlet on ‘Labour and Capital’); and as he now, on the completion of his second term, holds the second place in his year at St. John’s, there is a hope that he may take a good place in the mathematical tripos for 1878; and yet, since we got introduced to your books—two years ago—both he and I think he had best, so soon as he completes his course, go into farming; and hence the reference to growing crops that appeared in his letter last week, and which I am most happy to find has met with your approbation.” (Yes;—and I trust with higher approbation than mine.)IV. The following paragraphs from a county paper gladden me exceedingly, by taking from me all merit of originality in any part of the design of the operations of St. George’s Company, while they prove to the most incredulous not only the practicability, but the assured good of such operations, already, as will be seen, carried to triumphant results on a private gentleman’s estate.The ‘Agricultural Gazette’ gives, as one of a series of papers on “Noteworthy Agriculturists,” a sketch of Mr. William Mackenzie, Achandunie, who, acting for Mr. Matheson, has carried out so many improvements on the Ardross estates. The sketch is in the form of an autobiography, which, as the ‘Gazette’ remarks, carries with it a most pleasant impression of[300]directness and simplicity of character no less than of industry, energy, and success. It is accompanied by a portrait of Mr. Mackenzie, which his friends will recognize as a fair likeness. Mr. Mackenzie states that he was born in 1806, in the parish of Urquhart, Ross-shire, where his ancestors had resided for many generations. His father, who occupied a small farm, died about five years ago at the advanced age of ninety. In 1824, he (Mr. William Mackenzie) entered as an apprentice at Belmaduthy7Gardens, and after serving there three years, removed to the nurseries of Dickson and Co., Edinburgh, where he remained only a few months. He then went to the Duke of Buccleuch’s gardens at Dalkeith, serving under Mr. Macdonald, who was in advance of his time as a practical gardener. There he assisted in carrying out the improvements which were made in the gardens and pleasure-grounds. New ranges of hothouses and a fine conservatory were erected, into which the hot-water system of heating was, it is believed, first introduced in Scotland. Next Mr. Mackenzie assisted in laying out gardens and grounds at Barcaldine, the seat of Sir Duncan Campbell, in Argyllshire; and coming in 1835 to Rosehaugh, as head-gardener, forester, and superintendent of estate works, he carried out the construction of new gardens, both at Rosehaugh and Kinlochluichart, and the remodelling of private grounds and approaches. These large gardens at Barcaldine and Rosehaugh were made with great care,especially in selecting and preparing the soilfor the wall andvineryborders,so that after the lapse, in the one case of thirty years, and in the other of forty years, no decay or canker has appeared among the fruit trees.8[301]“In 1847 Mr. Matheson commenced the improvements at Ardross, the property of Alexander Matheson, Esq., M.P. for the county of Ross.“Ardross proper is surrounded by high hills, and with trifling exceptions was in a state of nature, the whole surface of the district being covered with coarse grass and heather, stunted birches, morass or quagmire, and studded with granite boulders drifted from the hills. The place was under sheep and a few black cattle, and, owing to the coarseness of the herbage the cattle were subject to red water.The tenants’ houses were mere hovels, without chimneys, and with little or no glass in the windows. The population of the district of Ardross proper was, in 1847, only 109 souls; and now, in 1875, the population on the same area is 600, and the number of children attending school is about 140.“In giving a summary of the improvements, we will begin with the pleasure-grounds.9They extend to about 800 acres. In forming them, waggons on rails were used for two years in removing knolls, forming terraces, and filling up gullies. The banks of the river and of the burns flowing through the grounds have been planted with upwards of a hundred different varieties of the finest and hardiest ornamental trees that could be procured, from the tulip-tree to the evergreen oak, and from the native pine to the Wellingtonia. Evergreen shrubs cover about 25 acres in detached portions on the banks of the river which flows immediately beneath the castle, as well as on the banks of two romantic burns, with beautiful cascades, and in ravines. The garden is enclosed with a brick-lined wall, and so boggy was the site that the foundation of the wall is more than 6 feet below[302]the sills of some of the doors. The south side is enclosed by a terrace wall 12 feet high, and the north wall is covered with glass, which includes vineries, conservatory, and orchard houses, besides a range of pits, all heated with water.The soil of the garden was prepared and carted a considerable distance,10as there was none to be got on the site.“Upwards of 5000 acres of moor ground have been planted, chiefly with Scotch fir and larch, the thinnings of which are now being shipped for pit props, the plants of the oldest woods only having been taken out of the nursery in 1847.“The extent of arable land may be best explained by stating that there are twenty-seven farms with thrashing mills, paying rents from £50 to £800 each; and upwards of a hundred ploughs are used in cultivating the lands improved. The steam plough is also to be seen at work on some of the farms.” (St. George does not, however, propose entertaining the curious spectator in this manner.) “Cattle reared on the reclaimed land have taken prizes at the Highland Society’s Shows, and at all local shows; and for cereals and green crops, they will bear a favourable comparison with any part of Scotland.“At one of the detached properties, great care had to be taken, and engineering skill used, in the drainage. Recently a low-lying part of the lands, a mile and a half long by three-quarters broad, was a mixture of the lower stratum of peaty bog, marsh, and spouty sand, charged with ochrey-coloured water, impregnated with sulphur and saltpetre. Attempts made by former occupants to drain this place were fruitless, from want of depth and proper outfall. We found all the pipes in their drains completely choked by deposited ochrey matter. The[303]whole subsoil was running sand. In order to make the drainage perfect, a main leading drain was made, 800 yards long, and in some places 8 feet deep, in which were laid ‘spigot and faucet,’ vitrified pipes 10 to 15 inches in diameter, jointed with cement to prevent sand from getting in, with junctions to receive pipes of smaller sizes, from 10 inches down to 6 inches. Minor drains are from 3½ to 4 feet deep, with tiles of 2 to 4 inch bore, the smaller sizes having collars on the joints. Large stone cisterns are formed to receive the silt, and ventilating shafts with iron gratings are built to give circulation of air. By these means the whole flat is drained effectually,and where bog rushes were the prevailing produce, crops of the richest wheat now grow.The stunted herbage and water were so poisonous that black cattle were known to have turned gray in a season (?).11“More than fifty miles of private roads have been made, and twelve miles of walks through the pleasure-grounds. One walk is six miles continuous, along the windings of fine scenery of the Alness. Upwards of forty miles of stone dykes and eighty of wire fences have been erected, enclosing the arable land and plantations.“For twenty years from three to four hundred men were employed; two hundred of them lived in a square of barracks for nearly eleven years,and so orderly were they that the services of a policeman were never required. There are still a number of men employed, but the improvements are now coming to a close.“All the assistance I had in the engineering and planning was[304]that of a young man only seventeen years old when the works were begun, and we never had occasion to employ a man for a single day re-doing work.“I may further add that I have now the great pleasure of seeing my liberal employer reletting all his farms on the Ardross estate to the same tenants, on a second nineteen years’ lease,” (at increased rents, of course, my friend?) “the second leases having been renewed between two and three years before the expiry of the previous leases, and none of the farms were ever advertised.“I cannot leave this part of the present brief sketch without noticing a feature in the important work so successfully carried out by my enlightened employer, and one which cannot fail to be a source of great satisfaction to himself. Among the first things he did was to establish a school in the district, with a most efficient teacher, and the result is that sons of the small farmers and labourers are now in respectable positions in various walks of life. They are to be found in the capacities of gardeners, artizans, and merchants, students of law, medicine, and divinity. One of them, Donald Ross, carried the Queen’s prize of £100 in the University, and is now one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. Another is the chief constable of the county. Others are in the colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and America, all doing well;and out of hundreds working for themselves, to my knowledge, not one has gone astray.12“I will now advert to the improvements on the west coast estates. A mansion-house was built in the parish of Kintail, with pleasure-grounds and gardens,the former being chiefly reclaimed from the sea. Two islands, which were surrounded by water 11 feet deep on the shore side, are now part of the lawn, the intervening spaces having been filled up by the removal of a hill of rotten rock.[305]This house is let to a shooting tenant. The garden is excellent for fruit, including peaches, nectarines, and apricots, which come to perfection. At Duncraig, recently, a new mansion-house has been built, with all the modern appliances. New gardens have also been made at Duncraig, the site of which was originally a narrow gully running between high ridges of rock. The gardens are upwards of two acres within the walls. The soil is composed of virgin soil and turfy loam, the whole having been carted a considerable distance. The gardens were completed in 1871, and the different kinds of fruit trees, including pears, peaches, and apricots, are now bearing.“Duncraig is rarely to be surpassed in scenery and beauty. The view is extensive, embracing the Cuchullin hills in Skye,” (etc., etc.) “There are two fresh-water lakes within the grounds, one covering thirty-seven acres, and the other about sixty acres, abounding with excellent trout and char. One of them supplies Duncraig House with water, having a fall of about 300 feet. The pipe in its course supplies the gardens; the livery stables and laundry have also connections for applying hose in cases of fire.“The conformation of the ground is a mingling of winding valleys with high rock hills, on which grow natural wood, such as birch, oak, ash, and mountain ash. Several of the valleys have been improved and laid out under permanent pasture, making the landscape, as seen from the front of the house, with wood, rock, and winding grassy bay, very picturesque.“There are twelve miles of private drives and walks—miles of them cut out of the solid rock, and in some places in the face of precipices 100 feet sheer up above the sea. A home-farm is in course of being improved at Achandarroch, a mile south of Duncraig House.”The ‘Gazette’ adds: Mr. Mackenzie himself farms some of the land which he has reclaimed, and nowhere probably is there a better example of what is possible in the way of agricultural improvement under a northern climate. Excellent crops of[306]barley, clover, wheat, and roots are grown where nothing but a marshy wilderness once existed. Here obviously are the circumstances and the experience which should guide and stimulate the efforts of estate owners and improvers in the way of the reclamation of land which is now waste and worthless.“Holme Head, Carlisle,“July 6th, 1875.“Dear Sir,—When I read the number of ‘Fors’ for last April, and came to your account of the rose-leaf cutting bees, I recollected that I had seen one of these bees making its fragmentary cell in a hole in a brick wall, and that I had often seen the remnants of the cut leaves; but I never had a chance of watching them when at work till last week; and thinking the result may be interesting to you, and may correct the omission you refer to at the foot of page 104 in the April ‘Fors,’ I take the liberty to send them to you.“I had the opportunity of seeing a great many bees—often half a dozen together—at work upon a solitary dog-rose in front of a house at a small watering-place (Silloth), and I observed that they cut various shapes at different times. I picked off a great many of the leaves that they had been at, and send you herewith one or two specimens. I find that these have occasionally cut through the midrib of the leaf; but this is a rare exception. I found they carried the cuttings to some adjoining sand-hills, where they had bored small holes in the sand; and in these they built their leaf-cells. The pollen in these cells was not purple, but yellow, and may have been gathered from the Hawkweed which covers the banks where their nests are made.“Since we came home, I have found some more leaves in my own garden similarly cut. The leaves I find to be cut in this way are the rose, French bean, and young laburnum.“Yours truly,“W. Lattimer.”[307]V. Part of a letter from the lady who sent me Helix virgata:—“We live in a poor neighbourhood, and I have come to know the history of many poor working people lately; and I want to understand so much about it, even more than I used to long to understand the mysterious life of shells and flowers. Why aren’t there public baths, etc., for children as much as public schools? They want washing more than teaching. ‘Hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and bodies washed in pure water,’is continually sounding in my ears.” (Well—why don’t you go and wash some, then?)“A poor woman, whose father was a West Country carrier,” (very good, but what isshe?—the gist of the story depends on that: at present it’s like one of those French twisty Bulimi, with no beginning to it,) “was so delighted the other day to find we knew the ‘West Country;’ and when I was saying something about our intending to take the children down in May to pick cowslips, her face gleamed with delight as she said, ‘Oh, the years since I’ve seen a cowslip!’ We used to make ‘tisties’ ” (twisties?) “of them, and it sent a thrill of remembrance through me of my own birthday treats, and cowslip-ball days.“But I’m so glad you like the shells. No, thereisnothing about vegetables in the word Bulimus; but ‘empty-bellied’ generally is hungry, and hungry generally eats a great deal when opportunity offers. Now these ‘Bulimi’ eat a great deal, (ofvegetables, it happens,) so I suppose some one who named them thought they must be very hungry or ‘empty-bellied.’ That’s the way I read the story.” Well, it’s very accommodating and ingenious of you to read it that way; but many snails, thrushes, blackbirds, or old gentlemen of my acquaintance who ‘eat a great deal,’ appear to me more suggestive of the epithet ‘full-’ than ‘empty-’—waist-coated, shall we say?[308]VI. Week’s Diary of a Companion of St. George:—“First day.—Received from Sheffield a dainty ‘well-poised little hammer’ and three sharp-pointed little chisels: felt quite cheerful about porphyry-cutting.“Second day.—Sent to the village in the morning for a slab of freestone; employed man in the afternoon to chisel a hole in it, and to fix the porphyry therein with plaster-of-Paris; drew a straight line, thinking it wiser not to begin with an asterisk; turned the points of two chisels without making the least impression on my line;—the process turned out to be skating, not engraving. Tried the third chisel, and, after diligent efforts, made a cut equal in depth to about two grains of sand. This is the Hamite bondage of art. Felt an increasing desire that the Master should try it, and a respect for the ancient Egyptians. Bore patiently the scoffs of the Amorites.“Third day.—Sent chisel to the village to be hardened. Was recommended a lead hammer. Finally, a friend went to the village and brought back with him an iron hammer and two shorter chisels. Was asked by an Amorite gardener how I was ‘getting on’—unconcealed pleasure on his part to hear that I was not getting on at all. Later, accomplished a beautifully irregular star-fish, which looksmashed outrather thancut, not the least like ‘sharp cliff-edged harbours,’ as the Master kindly supposes. I begin to feel for the ancient Egyptians: they must have got a great deal of porphyry-dust into their eyes. I shall rise in the morning to dulled points and splintered chisels; but ‘whenyou have cut your asterisk, you will know,’ etc., and this is not the voice of a syren, (see ‘Eagle’s Nest,’) but of my honoured Master.… A terrible suspicion occurs to me that he thought no one would or could cut it! Obedience is a fine thing! How it works in the midst of difficulties, dust, and worst of all—doubt!“Fourth day.—I think porphyry-cutting is delightful work: it[309]is true that I have not done any to-day, but I have had my chisels sharpened, and two new ones have arrived from the blacksmith this evening, made out of old files. Also, I have covered my chisels with pretty blue paper, and my hammer with blue-and-white ribbon. I feel the importance of the step gained. Surely I may rest righteously after such labour. If they sing ‘From Egypt lately come,’ in church, I shall think it very personal.“Fifth day.—My piece of porphyry is now enriched by a second star-fish, with a little more backbone in it, and two dividing lines. I worked on the lawn this morning, under thechestnuttree;—the derision of the Amorite gardener (who was mowing the grasswith a scythe) was manifested by the remark ‘Isthat-tall!’ I told him about the Egyptian tombs, but he probably thinks me mildly insane; he however suggested a flat edge instead of a point to a chisel, and I will try it.“Sixth day.—Had lead hammer cast, and waited for chisel.“Seventh day.—With third hammer and seventh chisel will surely charm the porphyry.“But, no! my latest asterisk is jagged in outline instead of sharp. I wonder what attempts others have made. Any one living in or near a blacksmith’s shop would have an advantage, for the chisels are always wanting hardening, or rectifying in some way; and my blue papers soon disappeared. If obedience for the sake of obedience is angelic, I must be an exalted creature. One Amorite’s suggestion was, ‘You would do a deal better with a softer material.’ This was the voice of the tempter.“What is gained?—(besides a lifelong affection for porphyry)—a knowledge of one more thing that I cannotdo; an admiration (to a certain extent) of those who could do it; and a wonder as to what the Master will require next of (amongst others) his faithful and obedient disciple.”[310]VII. Portion of valuable letter from Mr. Sillar:—“Kingswood Lodge, Lee Green, S.E.“August 7th, 1876.“My dear Mr. Ruskin,—It may interest your correspondent, ‘A Reader of Fors,’ and possibly yourself also, to know that interested persons have altered old John Wesley’s rules to suit modern ideas.“Rules of the Methodist Societies (Tyerman’s Life and Times of Wesley, p. 431).“Rule.—Leader to receive once a week what members are willing to give towardsrelief of the poor.“Altered to ‘support of the Gospel.’“Going to lawforbidden, is altered to ‘brothergoing to law withbrother.’“Original Rule.—The giving or taking things on usury, the words have been added, ‘that is, unlawful interest.’“Mr. Tyerman remarks, ‘the curious reader will forgive these trifles.’“I for one do not at all feel disposed to do so.”(Nor does St. George; nor has he either leave, or hope, to say, “God forgive them.”)[311]

I. Affairs of the Company.

I leave our accounts now wholly in the hands of Mr. Walker and Mr. Rydings, reserving to myself only the usual—as I understand—and proper functions of Director,—that of spending the Company’s money. I have ordered, as above stated, repairs at Barmouth, which will somewhat exceed our rents, I fancy; and a mineral cabinet for the Museum at Sheffield, in which the minerals are to rest, each in its own little cell, on purple, or otherwise fittingly coloured, velvet of the best. Permission to handle and examine them at ease will be eventually given, as a moral and mineralogical prize to the men who attain a certain proficiency in the two sciences of Mineralogy and Behaviour.

Our capital, it will be observed, is increased, by honest gift, this month, to the encouraging amount of £16 16s.;—the iniquitous interest, of which our shareholders get none, I have pretty nearly spent in our new land purchase.

Cash Account of St. George’s Company.

(From June 15th to Aug. 15th, 1876.)

1876.Dr.£s.d.June29.To Mrs. Jane Lisle11030.To,,Chas. Firth110Aug.7.To,,G. No. 50.1010012.To,,Miss Sargood220”Miss Christina Allen22015.To,,Balance due Mr. Ruskin14145£31105

1876.Cr.£s.d.June 16.By Balance due, Mr. Ruskin31105£31105

[296]

The Union Bank of London (Chancery Lane Branch) in Account with the St. George’s Fund.1876.Dr.£s.d.March15.To Balance1571110May3.To,,Cash Paid Mr. John Ruskin171106.To,,Ditto draft at Bridgwater (J. Talbot)91939.To,,Ditto draft at Douglas (E.Rydings)24189June9.To,,Ditto Cash50013.To,,Ditto, draft at Bridgwater (F. Talbot)20126”To,,Ditto, draft at Bilston (Wilkins)500017.To,,Ditto, Cash2000July6.To,,Dividend on £8000 Consols118100£42434

1876.Cr.£s.d.July28.By Cheque to Mr. John Ruskin33000Aug.15.To Balance9434£42434

II. Affairs of the Master.

It was not my fault, but my printers’ (who deserve raps for it), that mine came before the Company’s in last Fors.4It is, I think, now time to state, in general comment on my monotonous account, that the current expenses recorded in the bills of Jackson, Kate, Downs, and David, represent for the most part sums spent for the maintenance or comfort of others; and that I could if need were, for my own part, be utterly at ease in the sunny parlour of a village inn, with no more carriage or coachman than my own limbs,—no more service than a civil traveller’s proper share,—and the blessedness of freedom from responsibility from everything. To which condition, if I ever reduce myself by my extravagance, and, (indeed, just after paying my good Mr. Ellis for[297]thirteenth-century MSS.,5etc., a hundred and forty pounds, I am in treaty to-day with Mr. Quaritch for another, which he says is charged at the very lowest penny at three hundred and twenty)—it will be simply to me only occasion for the loadless traveller’s song; but as it would be greatly inconvenient to other people, I don’t at present intend it. Some day, indeed, perhaps I shall begin to turn a penny by my books. The bills drawn by Mr. Burgess represent now the only loss I incur on them.

£s.d.Stated Balance, July 15th617113Repayment and other receipts, July and August406651023178Expenses42750Balance, August 15th£596128

£s.d.July16.Geoghegan (blue neckties)400”Naval School55017.David6500”Downs250030.Jackson5000”Kate5000Aug.1.Herne Hill ground-rent230014.Burgess400015.Ellis and White14000”Lucy Tovey (gift)1000”Self (chiefly gone in black quartz from St Gothard Tunnel)1500£42750

III.

“My dear Sir,—I duly received your very kind note referring to the ‘notice to quit’ to Lord Lonsdale’s farmers in West[298]Cumberland, and have delayed to reply till I had made special inquiries, and find that, as a rule, these tenants have no leases, but have held their farms from year to year only.

“Formerly, I am told, some had leases; but as these expired they were not renewed, and the supposition now is that all such have run out, and that all now as yearly tenants have had the notice given them simultaneously.

“The notice is clearly given to allow a re-valuation to be made; and when the new rents are arranged, it is expected that leases will then be granted, though it is plain to be seen that all the increased prosperity that the prosperity of recent years of the coal and iron industries have caused to farming,may thus be secured to the landholder; and the farmers, with or without leases, but with higher rents, may be left to bear alone the ebb of the tide that is evidently on the turn; and in any or every case, the general public—the consumers of these farmers’ produce—will have to pay the extra rent, whatever it may be, that Lord Lonsdale may see fit to lay upon the land.6

“I have been studying this matter—the increase of land-rents—for many years, and consider it is very much to blame for the present high prices of all land produce, and the distress amongst the poorest of our population, as well as being a great hindrance to the carrying out of any schemes that have for their object the application of more of our own labour to our own soil. In[299]a letter to my son a few weeks ago, I ventured to say that the man who was the first to demonstrate by actual experiment that English soil could be made to double or quadruple its produce, would earn the name of a new Columbus, in that he had discovered another America at our own doors. This son, my oldest, having shown a turn for mathematics, I was induced to send to Cambridge, my hope being that a good education might fit him to solve some of the problems that are so pressing us for solution (and which I had been essaying myself in the pamphlet on ‘Labour and Capital’); and as he now, on the completion of his second term, holds the second place in his year at St. John’s, there is a hope that he may take a good place in the mathematical tripos for 1878; and yet, since we got introduced to your books—two years ago—both he and I think he had best, so soon as he completes his course, go into farming; and hence the reference to growing crops that appeared in his letter last week, and which I am most happy to find has met with your approbation.” (Yes;—and I trust with higher approbation than mine.)

IV. The following paragraphs from a county paper gladden me exceedingly, by taking from me all merit of originality in any part of the design of the operations of St. George’s Company, while they prove to the most incredulous not only the practicability, but the assured good of such operations, already, as will be seen, carried to triumphant results on a private gentleman’s estate.

The ‘Agricultural Gazette’ gives, as one of a series of papers on “Noteworthy Agriculturists,” a sketch of Mr. William Mackenzie, Achandunie, who, acting for Mr. Matheson, has carried out so many improvements on the Ardross estates. The sketch is in the form of an autobiography, which, as the ‘Gazette’ remarks, carries with it a most pleasant impression of[300]directness and simplicity of character no less than of industry, energy, and success. It is accompanied by a portrait of Mr. Mackenzie, which his friends will recognize as a fair likeness. Mr. Mackenzie states that he was born in 1806, in the parish of Urquhart, Ross-shire, where his ancestors had resided for many generations. His father, who occupied a small farm, died about five years ago at the advanced age of ninety. In 1824, he (Mr. William Mackenzie) entered as an apprentice at Belmaduthy7Gardens, and after serving there three years, removed to the nurseries of Dickson and Co., Edinburgh, where he remained only a few months. He then went to the Duke of Buccleuch’s gardens at Dalkeith, serving under Mr. Macdonald, who was in advance of his time as a practical gardener. There he assisted in carrying out the improvements which were made in the gardens and pleasure-grounds. New ranges of hothouses and a fine conservatory were erected, into which the hot-water system of heating was, it is believed, first introduced in Scotland. Next Mr. Mackenzie assisted in laying out gardens and grounds at Barcaldine, the seat of Sir Duncan Campbell, in Argyllshire; and coming in 1835 to Rosehaugh, as head-gardener, forester, and superintendent of estate works, he carried out the construction of new gardens, both at Rosehaugh and Kinlochluichart, and the remodelling of private grounds and approaches. These large gardens at Barcaldine and Rosehaugh were made with great care,especially in selecting and preparing the soilfor the wall andvineryborders,so that after the lapse, in the one case of thirty years, and in the other of forty years, no decay or canker has appeared among the fruit trees.8[301]“In 1847 Mr. Matheson commenced the improvements at Ardross, the property of Alexander Matheson, Esq., M.P. for the county of Ross.“Ardross proper is surrounded by high hills, and with trifling exceptions was in a state of nature, the whole surface of the district being covered with coarse grass and heather, stunted birches, morass or quagmire, and studded with granite boulders drifted from the hills. The place was under sheep and a few black cattle, and, owing to the coarseness of the herbage the cattle were subject to red water.The tenants’ houses were mere hovels, without chimneys, and with little or no glass in the windows. The population of the district of Ardross proper was, in 1847, only 109 souls; and now, in 1875, the population on the same area is 600, and the number of children attending school is about 140.“In giving a summary of the improvements, we will begin with the pleasure-grounds.9They extend to about 800 acres. In forming them, waggons on rails were used for two years in removing knolls, forming terraces, and filling up gullies. The banks of the river and of the burns flowing through the grounds have been planted with upwards of a hundred different varieties of the finest and hardiest ornamental trees that could be procured, from the tulip-tree to the evergreen oak, and from the native pine to the Wellingtonia. Evergreen shrubs cover about 25 acres in detached portions on the banks of the river which flows immediately beneath the castle, as well as on the banks of two romantic burns, with beautiful cascades, and in ravines. The garden is enclosed with a brick-lined wall, and so boggy was the site that the foundation of the wall is more than 6 feet below[302]the sills of some of the doors. The south side is enclosed by a terrace wall 12 feet high, and the north wall is covered with glass, which includes vineries, conservatory, and orchard houses, besides a range of pits, all heated with water.The soil of the garden was prepared and carted a considerable distance,10as there was none to be got on the site.“Upwards of 5000 acres of moor ground have been planted, chiefly with Scotch fir and larch, the thinnings of which are now being shipped for pit props, the plants of the oldest woods only having been taken out of the nursery in 1847.“The extent of arable land may be best explained by stating that there are twenty-seven farms with thrashing mills, paying rents from £50 to £800 each; and upwards of a hundred ploughs are used in cultivating the lands improved. The steam plough is also to be seen at work on some of the farms.” (St. George does not, however, propose entertaining the curious spectator in this manner.) “Cattle reared on the reclaimed land have taken prizes at the Highland Society’s Shows, and at all local shows; and for cereals and green crops, they will bear a favourable comparison with any part of Scotland.“At one of the detached properties, great care had to be taken, and engineering skill used, in the drainage. Recently a low-lying part of the lands, a mile and a half long by three-quarters broad, was a mixture of the lower stratum of peaty bog, marsh, and spouty sand, charged with ochrey-coloured water, impregnated with sulphur and saltpetre. Attempts made by former occupants to drain this place were fruitless, from want of depth and proper outfall. We found all the pipes in their drains completely choked by deposited ochrey matter. The[303]whole subsoil was running sand. In order to make the drainage perfect, a main leading drain was made, 800 yards long, and in some places 8 feet deep, in which were laid ‘spigot and faucet,’ vitrified pipes 10 to 15 inches in diameter, jointed with cement to prevent sand from getting in, with junctions to receive pipes of smaller sizes, from 10 inches down to 6 inches. Minor drains are from 3½ to 4 feet deep, with tiles of 2 to 4 inch bore, the smaller sizes having collars on the joints. Large stone cisterns are formed to receive the silt, and ventilating shafts with iron gratings are built to give circulation of air. By these means the whole flat is drained effectually,and where bog rushes were the prevailing produce, crops of the richest wheat now grow.The stunted herbage and water were so poisonous that black cattle were known to have turned gray in a season (?).11“More than fifty miles of private roads have been made, and twelve miles of walks through the pleasure-grounds. One walk is six miles continuous, along the windings of fine scenery of the Alness. Upwards of forty miles of stone dykes and eighty of wire fences have been erected, enclosing the arable land and plantations.“For twenty years from three to four hundred men were employed; two hundred of them lived in a square of barracks for nearly eleven years,and so orderly were they that the services of a policeman were never required. There are still a number of men employed, but the improvements are now coming to a close.“All the assistance I had in the engineering and planning was[304]that of a young man only seventeen years old when the works were begun, and we never had occasion to employ a man for a single day re-doing work.“I may further add that I have now the great pleasure of seeing my liberal employer reletting all his farms on the Ardross estate to the same tenants, on a second nineteen years’ lease,” (at increased rents, of course, my friend?) “the second leases having been renewed between two and three years before the expiry of the previous leases, and none of the farms were ever advertised.“I cannot leave this part of the present brief sketch without noticing a feature in the important work so successfully carried out by my enlightened employer, and one which cannot fail to be a source of great satisfaction to himself. Among the first things he did was to establish a school in the district, with a most efficient teacher, and the result is that sons of the small farmers and labourers are now in respectable positions in various walks of life. They are to be found in the capacities of gardeners, artizans, and merchants, students of law, medicine, and divinity. One of them, Donald Ross, carried the Queen’s prize of £100 in the University, and is now one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. Another is the chief constable of the county. Others are in the colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and America, all doing well;and out of hundreds working for themselves, to my knowledge, not one has gone astray.12“I will now advert to the improvements on the west coast estates. A mansion-house was built in the parish of Kintail, with pleasure-grounds and gardens,the former being chiefly reclaimed from the sea. Two islands, which were surrounded by water 11 feet deep on the shore side, are now part of the lawn, the intervening spaces having been filled up by the removal of a hill of rotten rock.[305]This house is let to a shooting tenant. The garden is excellent for fruit, including peaches, nectarines, and apricots, which come to perfection. At Duncraig, recently, a new mansion-house has been built, with all the modern appliances. New gardens have also been made at Duncraig, the site of which was originally a narrow gully running between high ridges of rock. The gardens are upwards of two acres within the walls. The soil is composed of virgin soil and turfy loam, the whole having been carted a considerable distance. The gardens were completed in 1871, and the different kinds of fruit trees, including pears, peaches, and apricots, are now bearing.“Duncraig is rarely to be surpassed in scenery and beauty. The view is extensive, embracing the Cuchullin hills in Skye,” (etc., etc.) “There are two fresh-water lakes within the grounds, one covering thirty-seven acres, and the other about sixty acres, abounding with excellent trout and char. One of them supplies Duncraig House with water, having a fall of about 300 feet. The pipe in its course supplies the gardens; the livery stables and laundry have also connections for applying hose in cases of fire.“The conformation of the ground is a mingling of winding valleys with high rock hills, on which grow natural wood, such as birch, oak, ash, and mountain ash. Several of the valleys have been improved and laid out under permanent pasture, making the landscape, as seen from the front of the house, with wood, rock, and winding grassy bay, very picturesque.“There are twelve miles of private drives and walks—miles of them cut out of the solid rock, and in some places in the face of precipices 100 feet sheer up above the sea. A home-farm is in course of being improved at Achandarroch, a mile south of Duncraig House.”The ‘Gazette’ adds: Mr. Mackenzie himself farms some of the land which he has reclaimed, and nowhere probably is there a better example of what is possible in the way of agricultural improvement under a northern climate. Excellent crops of[306]barley, clover, wheat, and roots are grown where nothing but a marshy wilderness once existed. Here obviously are the circumstances and the experience which should guide and stimulate the efforts of estate owners and improvers in the way of the reclamation of land which is now waste and worthless.

The ‘Agricultural Gazette’ gives, as one of a series of papers on “Noteworthy Agriculturists,” a sketch of Mr. William Mackenzie, Achandunie, who, acting for Mr. Matheson, has carried out so many improvements on the Ardross estates. The sketch is in the form of an autobiography, which, as the ‘Gazette’ remarks, carries with it a most pleasant impression of[300]directness and simplicity of character no less than of industry, energy, and success. It is accompanied by a portrait of Mr. Mackenzie, which his friends will recognize as a fair likeness. Mr. Mackenzie states that he was born in 1806, in the parish of Urquhart, Ross-shire, where his ancestors had resided for many generations. His father, who occupied a small farm, died about five years ago at the advanced age of ninety. In 1824, he (Mr. William Mackenzie) entered as an apprentice at Belmaduthy7Gardens, and after serving there three years, removed to the nurseries of Dickson and Co., Edinburgh, where he remained only a few months. He then went to the Duke of Buccleuch’s gardens at Dalkeith, serving under Mr. Macdonald, who was in advance of his time as a practical gardener. There he assisted in carrying out the improvements which were made in the gardens and pleasure-grounds. New ranges of hothouses and a fine conservatory were erected, into which the hot-water system of heating was, it is believed, first introduced in Scotland. Next Mr. Mackenzie assisted in laying out gardens and grounds at Barcaldine, the seat of Sir Duncan Campbell, in Argyllshire; and coming in 1835 to Rosehaugh, as head-gardener, forester, and superintendent of estate works, he carried out the construction of new gardens, both at Rosehaugh and Kinlochluichart, and the remodelling of private grounds and approaches. These large gardens at Barcaldine and Rosehaugh were made with great care,especially in selecting and preparing the soilfor the wall andvineryborders,so that after the lapse, in the one case of thirty years, and in the other of forty years, no decay or canker has appeared among the fruit trees.8[301]

“In 1847 Mr. Matheson commenced the improvements at Ardross, the property of Alexander Matheson, Esq., M.P. for the county of Ross.

“Ardross proper is surrounded by high hills, and with trifling exceptions was in a state of nature, the whole surface of the district being covered with coarse grass and heather, stunted birches, morass or quagmire, and studded with granite boulders drifted from the hills. The place was under sheep and a few black cattle, and, owing to the coarseness of the herbage the cattle were subject to red water.The tenants’ houses were mere hovels, without chimneys, and with little or no glass in the windows. The population of the district of Ardross proper was, in 1847, only 109 souls; and now, in 1875, the population on the same area is 600, and the number of children attending school is about 140.

“In giving a summary of the improvements, we will begin with the pleasure-grounds.9They extend to about 800 acres. In forming them, waggons on rails were used for two years in removing knolls, forming terraces, and filling up gullies. The banks of the river and of the burns flowing through the grounds have been planted with upwards of a hundred different varieties of the finest and hardiest ornamental trees that could be procured, from the tulip-tree to the evergreen oak, and from the native pine to the Wellingtonia. Evergreen shrubs cover about 25 acres in detached portions on the banks of the river which flows immediately beneath the castle, as well as on the banks of two romantic burns, with beautiful cascades, and in ravines. The garden is enclosed with a brick-lined wall, and so boggy was the site that the foundation of the wall is more than 6 feet below[302]the sills of some of the doors. The south side is enclosed by a terrace wall 12 feet high, and the north wall is covered with glass, which includes vineries, conservatory, and orchard houses, besides a range of pits, all heated with water.The soil of the garden was prepared and carted a considerable distance,10as there was none to be got on the site.

“Upwards of 5000 acres of moor ground have been planted, chiefly with Scotch fir and larch, the thinnings of which are now being shipped for pit props, the plants of the oldest woods only having been taken out of the nursery in 1847.

“The extent of arable land may be best explained by stating that there are twenty-seven farms with thrashing mills, paying rents from £50 to £800 each; and upwards of a hundred ploughs are used in cultivating the lands improved. The steam plough is also to be seen at work on some of the farms.” (St. George does not, however, propose entertaining the curious spectator in this manner.) “Cattle reared on the reclaimed land have taken prizes at the Highland Society’s Shows, and at all local shows; and for cereals and green crops, they will bear a favourable comparison with any part of Scotland.

“At one of the detached properties, great care had to be taken, and engineering skill used, in the drainage. Recently a low-lying part of the lands, a mile and a half long by three-quarters broad, was a mixture of the lower stratum of peaty bog, marsh, and spouty sand, charged with ochrey-coloured water, impregnated with sulphur and saltpetre. Attempts made by former occupants to drain this place were fruitless, from want of depth and proper outfall. We found all the pipes in their drains completely choked by deposited ochrey matter. The[303]whole subsoil was running sand. In order to make the drainage perfect, a main leading drain was made, 800 yards long, and in some places 8 feet deep, in which were laid ‘spigot and faucet,’ vitrified pipes 10 to 15 inches in diameter, jointed with cement to prevent sand from getting in, with junctions to receive pipes of smaller sizes, from 10 inches down to 6 inches. Minor drains are from 3½ to 4 feet deep, with tiles of 2 to 4 inch bore, the smaller sizes having collars on the joints. Large stone cisterns are formed to receive the silt, and ventilating shafts with iron gratings are built to give circulation of air. By these means the whole flat is drained effectually,and where bog rushes were the prevailing produce, crops of the richest wheat now grow.The stunted herbage and water were so poisonous that black cattle were known to have turned gray in a season (?).11

“More than fifty miles of private roads have been made, and twelve miles of walks through the pleasure-grounds. One walk is six miles continuous, along the windings of fine scenery of the Alness. Upwards of forty miles of stone dykes and eighty of wire fences have been erected, enclosing the arable land and plantations.

“For twenty years from three to four hundred men were employed; two hundred of them lived in a square of barracks for nearly eleven years,and so orderly were they that the services of a policeman were never required. There are still a number of men employed, but the improvements are now coming to a close.

“All the assistance I had in the engineering and planning was[304]that of a young man only seventeen years old when the works were begun, and we never had occasion to employ a man for a single day re-doing work.

“I may further add that I have now the great pleasure of seeing my liberal employer reletting all his farms on the Ardross estate to the same tenants, on a second nineteen years’ lease,” (at increased rents, of course, my friend?) “the second leases having been renewed between two and three years before the expiry of the previous leases, and none of the farms were ever advertised.

“I cannot leave this part of the present brief sketch without noticing a feature in the important work so successfully carried out by my enlightened employer, and one which cannot fail to be a source of great satisfaction to himself. Among the first things he did was to establish a school in the district, with a most efficient teacher, and the result is that sons of the small farmers and labourers are now in respectable positions in various walks of life. They are to be found in the capacities of gardeners, artizans, and merchants, students of law, medicine, and divinity. One of them, Donald Ross, carried the Queen’s prize of £100 in the University, and is now one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. Another is the chief constable of the county. Others are in the colonies of Australia, New Zealand, and America, all doing well;and out of hundreds working for themselves, to my knowledge, not one has gone astray.12

“I will now advert to the improvements on the west coast estates. A mansion-house was built in the parish of Kintail, with pleasure-grounds and gardens,the former being chiefly reclaimed from the sea. Two islands, which were surrounded by water 11 feet deep on the shore side, are now part of the lawn, the intervening spaces having been filled up by the removal of a hill of rotten rock.[305]This house is let to a shooting tenant. The garden is excellent for fruit, including peaches, nectarines, and apricots, which come to perfection. At Duncraig, recently, a new mansion-house has been built, with all the modern appliances. New gardens have also been made at Duncraig, the site of which was originally a narrow gully running between high ridges of rock. The gardens are upwards of two acres within the walls. The soil is composed of virgin soil and turfy loam, the whole having been carted a considerable distance. The gardens were completed in 1871, and the different kinds of fruit trees, including pears, peaches, and apricots, are now bearing.

“Duncraig is rarely to be surpassed in scenery and beauty. The view is extensive, embracing the Cuchullin hills in Skye,” (etc., etc.) “There are two fresh-water lakes within the grounds, one covering thirty-seven acres, and the other about sixty acres, abounding with excellent trout and char. One of them supplies Duncraig House with water, having a fall of about 300 feet. The pipe in its course supplies the gardens; the livery stables and laundry have also connections for applying hose in cases of fire.

“The conformation of the ground is a mingling of winding valleys with high rock hills, on which grow natural wood, such as birch, oak, ash, and mountain ash. Several of the valleys have been improved and laid out under permanent pasture, making the landscape, as seen from the front of the house, with wood, rock, and winding grassy bay, very picturesque.

“There are twelve miles of private drives and walks—miles of them cut out of the solid rock, and in some places in the face of precipices 100 feet sheer up above the sea. A home-farm is in course of being improved at Achandarroch, a mile south of Duncraig House.”

The ‘Gazette’ adds: Mr. Mackenzie himself farms some of the land which he has reclaimed, and nowhere probably is there a better example of what is possible in the way of agricultural improvement under a northern climate. Excellent crops of[306]barley, clover, wheat, and roots are grown where nothing but a marshy wilderness once existed. Here obviously are the circumstances and the experience which should guide and stimulate the efforts of estate owners and improvers in the way of the reclamation of land which is now waste and worthless.

“Holme Head, Carlisle,“July 6th, 1875.“Dear Sir,—When I read the number of ‘Fors’ for last April, and came to your account of the rose-leaf cutting bees, I recollected that I had seen one of these bees making its fragmentary cell in a hole in a brick wall, and that I had often seen the remnants of the cut leaves; but I never had a chance of watching them when at work till last week; and thinking the result may be interesting to you, and may correct the omission you refer to at the foot of page 104 in the April ‘Fors,’ I take the liberty to send them to you.“I had the opportunity of seeing a great many bees—often half a dozen together—at work upon a solitary dog-rose in front of a house at a small watering-place (Silloth), and I observed that they cut various shapes at different times. I picked off a great many of the leaves that they had been at, and send you herewith one or two specimens. I find that these have occasionally cut through the midrib of the leaf; but this is a rare exception. I found they carried the cuttings to some adjoining sand-hills, where they had bored small holes in the sand; and in these they built their leaf-cells. The pollen in these cells was not purple, but yellow, and may have been gathered from the Hawkweed which covers the banks where their nests are made.“Since we came home, I have found some more leaves in my own garden similarly cut. The leaves I find to be cut in this way are the rose, French bean, and young laburnum.“Yours truly,“W. Lattimer.”

“Holme Head, Carlisle,

“July 6th, 1875.

“Dear Sir,—When I read the number of ‘Fors’ for last April, and came to your account of the rose-leaf cutting bees, I recollected that I had seen one of these bees making its fragmentary cell in a hole in a brick wall, and that I had often seen the remnants of the cut leaves; but I never had a chance of watching them when at work till last week; and thinking the result may be interesting to you, and may correct the omission you refer to at the foot of page 104 in the April ‘Fors,’ I take the liberty to send them to you.

“I had the opportunity of seeing a great many bees—often half a dozen together—at work upon a solitary dog-rose in front of a house at a small watering-place (Silloth), and I observed that they cut various shapes at different times. I picked off a great many of the leaves that they had been at, and send you herewith one or two specimens. I find that these have occasionally cut through the midrib of the leaf; but this is a rare exception. I found they carried the cuttings to some adjoining sand-hills, where they had bored small holes in the sand; and in these they built their leaf-cells. The pollen in these cells was not purple, but yellow, and may have been gathered from the Hawkweed which covers the banks where their nests are made.

“Since we came home, I have found some more leaves in my own garden similarly cut. The leaves I find to be cut in this way are the rose, French bean, and young laburnum.

“Yours truly,“W. Lattimer.”

[307]

V. Part of a letter from the lady who sent me Helix virgata:—

“We live in a poor neighbourhood, and I have come to know the history of many poor working people lately; and I want to understand so much about it, even more than I used to long to understand the mysterious life of shells and flowers. Why aren’t there public baths, etc., for children as much as public schools? They want washing more than teaching. ‘Hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and bodies washed in pure water,’is continually sounding in my ears.” (Well—why don’t you go and wash some, then?)

“A poor woman, whose father was a West Country carrier,” (very good, but what isshe?—the gist of the story depends on that: at present it’s like one of those French twisty Bulimi, with no beginning to it,) “was so delighted the other day to find we knew the ‘West Country;’ and when I was saying something about our intending to take the children down in May to pick cowslips, her face gleamed with delight as she said, ‘Oh, the years since I’ve seen a cowslip!’ We used to make ‘tisties’ ” (twisties?) “of them, and it sent a thrill of remembrance through me of my own birthday treats, and cowslip-ball days.

“But I’m so glad you like the shells. No, thereisnothing about vegetables in the word Bulimus; but ‘empty-bellied’ generally is hungry, and hungry generally eats a great deal when opportunity offers. Now these ‘Bulimi’ eat a great deal, (ofvegetables, it happens,) so I suppose some one who named them thought they must be very hungry or ‘empty-bellied.’ That’s the way I read the story.” Well, it’s very accommodating and ingenious of you to read it that way; but many snails, thrushes, blackbirds, or old gentlemen of my acquaintance who ‘eat a great deal,’ appear to me more suggestive of the epithet ‘full-’ than ‘empty-’—waist-coated, shall we say?[308]

VI. Week’s Diary of a Companion of St. George:—

“First day.—Received from Sheffield a dainty ‘well-poised little hammer’ and three sharp-pointed little chisels: felt quite cheerful about porphyry-cutting.

“Second day.—Sent to the village in the morning for a slab of freestone; employed man in the afternoon to chisel a hole in it, and to fix the porphyry therein with plaster-of-Paris; drew a straight line, thinking it wiser not to begin with an asterisk; turned the points of two chisels without making the least impression on my line;—the process turned out to be skating, not engraving. Tried the third chisel, and, after diligent efforts, made a cut equal in depth to about two grains of sand. This is the Hamite bondage of art. Felt an increasing desire that the Master should try it, and a respect for the ancient Egyptians. Bore patiently the scoffs of the Amorites.

“Third day.—Sent chisel to the village to be hardened. Was recommended a lead hammer. Finally, a friend went to the village and brought back with him an iron hammer and two shorter chisels. Was asked by an Amorite gardener how I was ‘getting on’—unconcealed pleasure on his part to hear that I was not getting on at all. Later, accomplished a beautifully irregular star-fish, which looksmashed outrather thancut, not the least like ‘sharp cliff-edged harbours,’ as the Master kindly supposes. I begin to feel for the ancient Egyptians: they must have got a great deal of porphyry-dust into their eyes. I shall rise in the morning to dulled points and splintered chisels; but ‘whenyou have cut your asterisk, you will know,’ etc., and this is not the voice of a syren, (see ‘Eagle’s Nest,’) but of my honoured Master.… A terrible suspicion occurs to me that he thought no one would or could cut it! Obedience is a fine thing! How it works in the midst of difficulties, dust, and worst of all—doubt!

“Fourth day.—I think porphyry-cutting is delightful work: it[309]is true that I have not done any to-day, but I have had my chisels sharpened, and two new ones have arrived from the blacksmith this evening, made out of old files. Also, I have covered my chisels with pretty blue paper, and my hammer with blue-and-white ribbon. I feel the importance of the step gained. Surely I may rest righteously after such labour. If they sing ‘From Egypt lately come,’ in church, I shall think it very personal.

“Fifth day.—My piece of porphyry is now enriched by a second star-fish, with a little more backbone in it, and two dividing lines. I worked on the lawn this morning, under thechestnuttree;—the derision of the Amorite gardener (who was mowing the grasswith a scythe) was manifested by the remark ‘Isthat-tall!’ I told him about the Egyptian tombs, but he probably thinks me mildly insane; he however suggested a flat edge instead of a point to a chisel, and I will try it.

“Sixth day.—Had lead hammer cast, and waited for chisel.

“Seventh day.—With third hammer and seventh chisel will surely charm the porphyry.

“But, no! my latest asterisk is jagged in outline instead of sharp. I wonder what attempts others have made. Any one living in or near a blacksmith’s shop would have an advantage, for the chisels are always wanting hardening, or rectifying in some way; and my blue papers soon disappeared. If obedience for the sake of obedience is angelic, I must be an exalted creature. One Amorite’s suggestion was, ‘You would do a deal better with a softer material.’ This was the voice of the tempter.

“What is gained?—(besides a lifelong affection for porphyry)—a knowledge of one more thing that I cannotdo; an admiration (to a certain extent) of those who could do it; and a wonder as to what the Master will require next of (amongst others) his faithful and obedient disciple.”[310]

VII. Portion of valuable letter from Mr. Sillar:—

“Kingswood Lodge, Lee Green, S.E.“August 7th, 1876.“My dear Mr. Ruskin,—It may interest your correspondent, ‘A Reader of Fors,’ and possibly yourself also, to know that interested persons have altered old John Wesley’s rules to suit modern ideas.“Rules of the Methodist Societies (Tyerman’s Life and Times of Wesley, p. 431).“Rule.—Leader to receive once a week what members are willing to give towardsrelief of the poor.“Altered to ‘support of the Gospel.’“Going to lawforbidden, is altered to ‘brothergoing to law withbrother.’“Original Rule.—The giving or taking things on usury, the words have been added, ‘that is, unlawful interest.’“Mr. Tyerman remarks, ‘the curious reader will forgive these trifles.’“I for one do not at all feel disposed to do so.”(Nor does St. George; nor has he either leave, or hope, to say, “God forgive them.”)

“Kingswood Lodge, Lee Green, S.E.

“August 7th, 1876.

“My dear Mr. Ruskin,—It may interest your correspondent, ‘A Reader of Fors,’ and possibly yourself also, to know that interested persons have altered old John Wesley’s rules to suit modern ideas.

“Rules of the Methodist Societies (Tyerman’s Life and Times of Wesley, p. 431).

“Rule.—Leader to receive once a week what members are willing to give towardsrelief of the poor.

“Altered to ‘support of the Gospel.’

“Going to lawforbidden, is altered to ‘brothergoing to law withbrother.’

“Original Rule.—The giving or taking things on usury, the words have been added, ‘that is, unlawful interest.’

“Mr. Tyerman remarks, ‘the curious reader will forgive these trifles.’

“I for one do not at all feel disposed to do so.”

(Nor does St. George; nor has he either leave, or hope, to say, “God forgive them.”)

[311]

1Whatcanbe done, ultimately, it is not yet in human imagination to conceive. Whathasbeen done, by one sensible man, for the land he had under control, may be read in the fourth article of our correspondence.↑2Most London theatre-goers will recollect the Butterman’s pity for his son, in “Our Boys,” as he examines the remains of the breakfast in their lodgings.↑3The law of symmetry, however, rests on deeper foundations than that of mere order. It is here, in Greek terms, too subtle to be translated except bit by bit, as we want them.Τίς οὖν δὴ πρᾶξις φίλη καὶ ἀκόλουθος θεῷ; μία καὶ ἕνα λόγον ἔχουσα ἀρχαῖον, ὅτι τῷ μὲν ὀμοίῳ τὸ ὅμοιον ὄντι μετρίῳ φίλον ἂν εἴη, τὰ δ’ ἄμετρα οὔτ’ ἀλλήλοις οὔτε τοῖς ἐμμέτροις.—(Plato, Laws, Book IV.)↑4Note by printer:—“We did this to avoid an unseemly division of balance-sheet, and of two evils thought this the least.”↑5One of these is a perfect English Bible, folio, and in beautiful state, sent to Sheffield for the first volume of our Museum library. Of course I must make St. George a present of it.↑6As I correct this sheet, Fors places another Carlisle paper in my hand; from which I gather that Lord Lonsdale’s conceptions of what is fit, and not, are probably now changed. But my correspondent is wrong inassumingthat the public will have to pay the extra rent. Very probably they will if the farming improvements are fallacious; but if indeed produce can be raised at less expense, the increased rentmayrepresent only the difference between past and present cost of production. In this sense, however, the publicdopay Lord Lonsdale’s extra rent, that their market prices, but for his Lordship, would have been lowered. As matters stand, they may be thankful if they are not raised.↑7I can’t be responsible for these Scotch names. I sent the slip of paper to my printers, and ‘on their eyes be it.’↑8Italics mine (throughout the article, the rest of which is in Mr. Mackenzie’s own words). Have the vine-proprietors of Europe yet begun to look to the Earth—not the air, as the power that fails them? (See noted.)↑9It will, I hope, not be thought an absurdity in the St. George’s Company to retain on their estates ‘pleasure-grounds’ for theirtenants, instead of themselves. In this one respect, and in this only, their public work will differ from this admirable piece of ‘private enterprise.’↑10Supposing the labour of all navvies, gold-diggers, and bad architects, throughout the world during the last fifty years, had been spent entirely in carting soil to where it was wanted for vegetables,—my dinnerless friends, you would have found the difference, by this time!↑11This passage, in capitals, being wholly astounding to me, I venture to put a note of interrogation to it. I have long myself been questioning the farmers in Westmoreland about the quantity of rank bog grass they let grow. Buttheironly idea of improvement is to burn the heather; this being a cheap operation, and dangerous only to their neighbours’ woods. Brantwood was within an ace of becoming Brantashes last summer.↑12The name of the—certainlyveryefficient—teacher of these young people, and the general principles of their tuition, would have been a desirable addition, St. George thinks, to the information furnished by Mr. Mackenzie.↑

1Whatcanbe done, ultimately, it is not yet in human imagination to conceive. Whathasbeen done, by one sensible man, for the land he had under control, may be read in the fourth article of our correspondence.↑2Most London theatre-goers will recollect the Butterman’s pity for his son, in “Our Boys,” as he examines the remains of the breakfast in their lodgings.↑3The law of symmetry, however, rests on deeper foundations than that of mere order. It is here, in Greek terms, too subtle to be translated except bit by bit, as we want them.Τίς οὖν δὴ πρᾶξις φίλη καὶ ἀκόλουθος θεῷ; μία καὶ ἕνα λόγον ἔχουσα ἀρχαῖον, ὅτι τῷ μὲν ὀμοίῳ τὸ ὅμοιον ὄντι μετρίῳ φίλον ἂν εἴη, τὰ δ’ ἄμετρα οὔτ’ ἀλλήλοις οὔτε τοῖς ἐμμέτροις.—(Plato, Laws, Book IV.)↑4Note by printer:—“We did this to avoid an unseemly division of balance-sheet, and of two evils thought this the least.”↑5One of these is a perfect English Bible, folio, and in beautiful state, sent to Sheffield for the first volume of our Museum library. Of course I must make St. George a present of it.↑6As I correct this sheet, Fors places another Carlisle paper in my hand; from which I gather that Lord Lonsdale’s conceptions of what is fit, and not, are probably now changed. But my correspondent is wrong inassumingthat the public will have to pay the extra rent. Very probably they will if the farming improvements are fallacious; but if indeed produce can be raised at less expense, the increased rentmayrepresent only the difference between past and present cost of production. In this sense, however, the publicdopay Lord Lonsdale’s extra rent, that their market prices, but for his Lordship, would have been lowered. As matters stand, they may be thankful if they are not raised.↑7I can’t be responsible for these Scotch names. I sent the slip of paper to my printers, and ‘on their eyes be it.’↑8Italics mine (throughout the article, the rest of which is in Mr. Mackenzie’s own words). Have the vine-proprietors of Europe yet begun to look to the Earth—not the air, as the power that fails them? (See noted.)↑9It will, I hope, not be thought an absurdity in the St. George’s Company to retain on their estates ‘pleasure-grounds’ for theirtenants, instead of themselves. In this one respect, and in this only, their public work will differ from this admirable piece of ‘private enterprise.’↑10Supposing the labour of all navvies, gold-diggers, and bad architects, throughout the world during the last fifty years, had been spent entirely in carting soil to where it was wanted for vegetables,—my dinnerless friends, you would have found the difference, by this time!↑11This passage, in capitals, being wholly astounding to me, I venture to put a note of interrogation to it. I have long myself been questioning the farmers in Westmoreland about the quantity of rank bog grass they let grow. Buttheironly idea of improvement is to burn the heather; this being a cheap operation, and dangerous only to their neighbours’ woods. Brantwood was within an ace of becoming Brantashes last summer.↑12The name of the—certainlyveryefficient—teacher of these young people, and the general principles of their tuition, would have been a desirable addition, St. George thinks, to the information furnished by Mr. Mackenzie.↑

1Whatcanbe done, ultimately, it is not yet in human imagination to conceive. Whathasbeen done, by one sensible man, for the land he had under control, may be read in the fourth article of our correspondence.↑

1Whatcanbe done, ultimately, it is not yet in human imagination to conceive. Whathasbeen done, by one sensible man, for the land he had under control, may be read in the fourth article of our correspondence.↑

2Most London theatre-goers will recollect the Butterman’s pity for his son, in “Our Boys,” as he examines the remains of the breakfast in their lodgings.↑

2Most London theatre-goers will recollect the Butterman’s pity for his son, in “Our Boys,” as he examines the remains of the breakfast in their lodgings.↑

3The law of symmetry, however, rests on deeper foundations than that of mere order. It is here, in Greek terms, too subtle to be translated except bit by bit, as we want them.Τίς οὖν δὴ πρᾶξις φίλη καὶ ἀκόλουθος θεῷ; μία καὶ ἕνα λόγον ἔχουσα ἀρχαῖον, ὅτι τῷ μὲν ὀμοίῳ τὸ ὅμοιον ὄντι μετρίῳ φίλον ἂν εἴη, τὰ δ’ ἄμετρα οὔτ’ ἀλλήλοις οὔτε τοῖς ἐμμέτροις.—(Plato, Laws, Book IV.)↑

3The law of symmetry, however, rests on deeper foundations than that of mere order. It is here, in Greek terms, too subtle to be translated except bit by bit, as we want them.

Τίς οὖν δὴ πρᾶξις φίλη καὶ ἀκόλουθος θεῷ; μία καὶ ἕνα λόγον ἔχουσα ἀρχαῖον, ὅτι τῷ μὲν ὀμοίῳ τὸ ὅμοιον ὄντι μετρίῳ φίλον ἂν εἴη, τὰ δ’ ἄμετρα οὔτ’ ἀλλήλοις οὔτε τοῖς ἐμμέτροις.—(Plato, Laws, Book IV.)↑

4Note by printer:—“We did this to avoid an unseemly division of balance-sheet, and of two evils thought this the least.”↑

4Note by printer:—“We did this to avoid an unseemly division of balance-sheet, and of two evils thought this the least.”↑

5One of these is a perfect English Bible, folio, and in beautiful state, sent to Sheffield for the first volume of our Museum library. Of course I must make St. George a present of it.↑

5One of these is a perfect English Bible, folio, and in beautiful state, sent to Sheffield for the first volume of our Museum library. Of course I must make St. George a present of it.↑

6As I correct this sheet, Fors places another Carlisle paper in my hand; from which I gather that Lord Lonsdale’s conceptions of what is fit, and not, are probably now changed. But my correspondent is wrong inassumingthat the public will have to pay the extra rent. Very probably they will if the farming improvements are fallacious; but if indeed produce can be raised at less expense, the increased rentmayrepresent only the difference between past and present cost of production. In this sense, however, the publicdopay Lord Lonsdale’s extra rent, that their market prices, but for his Lordship, would have been lowered. As matters stand, they may be thankful if they are not raised.↑

6As I correct this sheet, Fors places another Carlisle paper in my hand; from which I gather that Lord Lonsdale’s conceptions of what is fit, and not, are probably now changed. But my correspondent is wrong inassumingthat the public will have to pay the extra rent. Very probably they will if the farming improvements are fallacious; but if indeed produce can be raised at less expense, the increased rentmayrepresent only the difference between past and present cost of production. In this sense, however, the publicdopay Lord Lonsdale’s extra rent, that their market prices, but for his Lordship, would have been lowered. As matters stand, they may be thankful if they are not raised.↑

7I can’t be responsible for these Scotch names. I sent the slip of paper to my printers, and ‘on their eyes be it.’↑

7I can’t be responsible for these Scotch names. I sent the slip of paper to my printers, and ‘on their eyes be it.’↑

8Italics mine (throughout the article, the rest of which is in Mr. Mackenzie’s own words). Have the vine-proprietors of Europe yet begun to look to the Earth—not the air, as the power that fails them? (See noted.)↑

8Italics mine (throughout the article, the rest of which is in Mr. Mackenzie’s own words). Have the vine-proprietors of Europe yet begun to look to the Earth—not the air, as the power that fails them? (See noted.)↑

9It will, I hope, not be thought an absurdity in the St. George’s Company to retain on their estates ‘pleasure-grounds’ for theirtenants, instead of themselves. In this one respect, and in this only, their public work will differ from this admirable piece of ‘private enterprise.’↑

9It will, I hope, not be thought an absurdity in the St. George’s Company to retain on their estates ‘pleasure-grounds’ for theirtenants, instead of themselves. In this one respect, and in this only, their public work will differ from this admirable piece of ‘private enterprise.’↑

10Supposing the labour of all navvies, gold-diggers, and bad architects, throughout the world during the last fifty years, had been spent entirely in carting soil to where it was wanted for vegetables,—my dinnerless friends, you would have found the difference, by this time!↑

10Supposing the labour of all navvies, gold-diggers, and bad architects, throughout the world during the last fifty years, had been spent entirely in carting soil to where it was wanted for vegetables,—my dinnerless friends, you would have found the difference, by this time!↑

11This passage, in capitals, being wholly astounding to me, I venture to put a note of interrogation to it. I have long myself been questioning the farmers in Westmoreland about the quantity of rank bog grass they let grow. Buttheironly idea of improvement is to burn the heather; this being a cheap operation, and dangerous only to their neighbours’ woods. Brantwood was within an ace of becoming Brantashes last summer.↑

11This passage, in capitals, being wholly astounding to me, I venture to put a note of interrogation to it. I have long myself been questioning the farmers in Westmoreland about the quantity of rank bog grass they let grow. Buttheironly idea of improvement is to burn the heather; this being a cheap operation, and dangerous only to their neighbours’ woods. Brantwood was within an ace of becoming Brantashes last summer.↑

12The name of the—certainlyveryefficient—teacher of these young people, and the general principles of their tuition, would have been a desirable addition, St. George thinks, to the information furnished by Mr. Mackenzie.↑

12The name of the—certainlyveryefficient—teacher of these young people, and the general principles of their tuition, would have been a desirable addition, St. George thinks, to the information furnished by Mr. Mackenzie.↑

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