LETTER LXVI.

LETTER LXVI.Brantwood,14th May, 1876.Those of my readers who have followed me as far as I have hitherto gone in our careful reading of the Pentateuch, must, I think, have felt with me, in natural consequence of this careful reading, more than hitherto, the life and reality of the record; but, in the degree of this new life, new wonderfulness, and difficult credibility! For it is always easy to imagine that we believe what we do not understand; and often graceful and convenient to consent in the belief of others, as to what we do not care about. But when we begin to know clearly what is told, the question if it be fable or fact becomes inevitable in our minds; and if the fact, once admitted, would bear upon our conduct, its admission can no longer be made a matter of mere social courtesy.Accordingly, I find one of my more earnest readers[172]already asking me, privately, if I really believed that the hail on Good Friday last had been sent as a punishment for national sin?—and I should think, and even hope, that other of my readers would like to ask me, respecting the same passage, whether I believed that the sun ever stood still?To whom I could only answer, what I answered some time since in my paper on Miracle for the Metaphysical Society, (‘Contemporary Review’) that the true miracle, to my mind, would not be in the sun’s standing still, but IS in its going on! We are all of us being swept down to death in a sea of miracle; we are drowned in wonder, as gnats in a Rhine whirlpool: unless we are worse,—drowned in pleasure, or sloth, or insolence.Nevertheless, I do not feel myself in the least called upon to believe that the sun stood still, or the earth either, during that pursuit at Ajalon. Nay, it would not anywise amaze me to find that there never had been any such pursuit—never any Joshua, never any Moses; and that the Jews, “taken generally,” as an amiable clerical friend told me from his pulpit a Sunday or two ago, “were a Christian people.”But it does amaze me—almost to helplessness of hand and thought—to find the men and women of these days careless of such issue; and content, so that they can feed and breathe their fill, to eat like cattle, and breathe like plants, questionless of the Spirit that makes the grass to grow for them on the mountains, or the[173]breeze they breathe on them, its messengers, or the fire that dresses their food, its minister. Desolate souls, for whom the sun—beneath, not above, the horizon—stands still for ever.‘Amazed,’ I say, ‘almost to helplessness of hand and thought’—quite literally of both. I was reading yesterday, by Fors’ order, Mr. Edward B. Tylor’s idea of the Greek faith in Apollo: “If the sun travels along its course like a glittering chariot, forthwith the wheels, and the driver, and the horses are there;”1and Mr. Frederick Harrison’s gushing article on Humanity, in the ‘Contemporary Review’; and a letter about our Cotton Industry, (hereafter to be quoted,2) and this presently following bit of Sir Philip Sidney’s 68th Psalm;—and my hands are cold this morning, after the horror, and wonder, and puzzlement of my total Sun-less-day, and my head is now standing still, or at least turning round, giddy, instead of doing its work by Shrewsbury clock; and I don’t know where to begin with the quantity I want to say,—all the less that I’ve said a great deal of it before, if I only knew where to tell you to find it. All up and down my later books, from ‘Unto This Last’ to ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ and again and again throughout ‘Fors,’[174]you will find references to the practical connection between physical and spiritual light—of which now I would fain state, in the most unmistakable terms, this sum: that you cannot love the real sun, that is to say physical light and colour, rightly, unless you love the spiritual sun, that is to say justice and truth, rightly. That for unjust and untrue persons, there is no real joy in physical light, so that they don’t even know what the word means. That the entire system of modern life is so corrupted with the ghastliest forms of injustice and untruth, carried to the point of not recognising themselves as either—for as long as Bill Sykes knows that he is a robber, and Jeremy Diddler that he is a rascal, there is still some of Heaven’s light left for both—but when everybody steals, cheats, and goes to church, complacently, and the light of their whole body is darkness, how great is that darkness! And that the physical result of that mental vileness is a total carelessness of the beauty of sky, or the cleanness of streams, or the life of animals and flowers: and I believe that the powers of Nature are depressed or perverted, together with the Spirit of Man; and therefore that conditions of storm and of physical darkness, such as never were before in Christian times, are developing themselves, in connection also with forms of loathsome insanity, multiplying through the whole genesis of modern brains.As I correct this sheet for press, I chance, by Fors’[175]order, in a prayer of St. John Damascene’s to the Virgin, on this, to me, very curious and interesting clause: “Redeem me from the dark metamorphosis of the angels, rescuing me from the bitter law-giving of the farmers of the air, and the rulers of the darkness.”“τῆς σκοτεινῆς με τῶν διαμόνων λυτρου μέτημορφῆς, (I am not answerable either for Damascene Greek, or for my MS. of it, in 1396,)τοῦ πικροτάτου λογοθεσίου τῶν τελωνῶν τοῦ ἀέρος καὶ τῶν ἀρχόντων τοῦ σκότους ἐξαίρουσα.”And now—of this entangling in the shrine of half born and half-sighted things, see this piece of Sir Philip Sidney’s psalm. I want it also for the bit of conchology at the end. The italics are mine.“And call ye this to utter what is just,You that of justice hold the sov’raign throne?And call yee this to yield, O sonnes of dust,To wronged brethren ev’ry one his own?O no: it is your long malicious willNow to the world to make by practice known,With whose oppression you the ballance fill,Just to your selves, indiff’rent else to none.But what could they, who ev’n in birth declin’d,From truth and right to lies and injuries?To shew thevenom of their cancred myndThe adder’s image scarcely can suffice.[176]Nay, scarce the aspick may with them contend,On whom the charmer all in vaine appliesHis skillful’st spells: aye, missing of his end,While sheeself-deaf, and unaffectedlies.Lord, crack their teeth, Lord, crush Thou these lions’ jawes,Soe lett them sinck as water in the sand:When deadly bow their aiming fury drawes,Shiver the shaft, ere past the shooter’s hand.So make them melt as the dishowsed snaile,Or as the embrio, whose vitall bandBreakes ere it holdes, and formlesse eyes doe faileTo see the sun, though brought to lightfull land.”‘Dishoused’ snail! That’s a bit, observe, of Sir Philip’s own natural history, perfecting the image in the psalm, “as a snail which melteth.” The ‘housed’ snail can shelter himself from evil weather, but the poor houseless slug, a mere slimy mass of helpless blackness,—shower-begotten, as it seems,—what is to become ofitwhen the sun is up!Not that even houseless snails melt,—nor that there’s anything about snails at all in David’s psalm, I believe, both Vulgate and LXX. saying ‘wax’ instead, as in Psalms lxviii. 2, xcvii. 5, etc.; but I suppose there’s some reptilian sense in the Hebrew, justifying our translation here—all the more interesting to me[177]because of a puzzle I got into in Isaiah, the other day; respecting which, lest you should fancy I’m too ready to give up Joshua and the sun without taking trouble about them, please observe this very certain condition of your Scriptural studies: that if you read the Bible with predetermination to pick out every text you approve of—that is to say, generally, any that confirm you in the conceit of your own religious sect,—that console you for the consequences of your own faults,—or assure you of a pleasant future though you attend to none of your present duties—on these terms you will find the Bible entirely intelligible, and wholly delightful: but if you read it with a real purpose of trying to understand it, and obey; and so read it all through, steadily, you will find it, out and out, the crabbedest and most difficult book you ever tried; horribly ill written in many parts, according to all human canons; totally unintelligible in others; and with the gold of it only to be got at by a process of crushing in which nothing but the iron teeth of the fiercest and honestest resolution will prevail against its adamant.For instance, take the 16th of Isaiah. Who is to send the Lamb? why is the Lamb to be sent? what does the Lamb mean? There is nothing in the Greek Bible about a Lamb at all, nor is anybody told to send anything. But God saysHewill send something, apostolically, as reptiles!Then, are the daughters of Moab the outcasts, as[178]in the second verse, or other people, as in the fourth? How is Moab’s throne to be established in righteousness, in the tabernacle of David, in the fifth? What are his lies not to be, in the sixth? And why is he to howl for himself, in the seventh? Ask any of the young jackanapes you put up to chatter out of your pulpits, to tell you even so much as this, of the first half-dozen verses! But above all, ask them who the persons are who are to be sent apostolically as reptiles?Meanwhile, on the way to answer, I’ve got a letter,3not from a jackanapes, but a thoroughly learned and modest clergyman, and old friend, advising me of my mistake in April Fors, in supposing that Rahab, in the 89th Psalm, means the harlot. It is, he tells me, a Hebrew word for the Dragon adversary, as in the verse “He hath cut Rahab, and wounded the Dragon.” That will come all the clearer and prettier for us, when we have worked it out, with Rahab herself and all; meantime, please observe what a busy creature she must have been—the stalks of her flax in heaps enough to hide the messengers! doubtless also, she was able to dye her thread of the brightest scarlet, a becoming colour.4Well, I can’t get that paper of Mr. Frederick Harrison’s out of my head; chiefly because I know and like its writer; and Idon’tlike his wasting his time in writing[179]that sort of stuff. What I have got to say to him, anent it, may better be said publicly, because I must write it carefully, and with some fulness; and if he won’t attend to me, perhaps some of his readers may. So I consider him, for the time, as one of my acquaintances among working men, and dedicate the close of this letter to him specially.My dear Harrison,—I am very glad you have been enjoying yourself at Oxford; and that you still think it a pretty place. But why, in the name of all that’s developing, did you walk in those wretched old Magdalen walks? They’re as dull as they were thirty years ago. Why didn’t you promenade in our new street, opposite Mr. Ryman’s? or under the rapturous sanctities of Keble? or beneath the lively new zigzag parapet of Tom Quad?—or, finally, in the name of all that’s human and progressive, why not up and down the elongating suburb of the married Fellows, on the cock-horse road to Banbury?However, I’m glad you’ve been at the old place; even though you wasted the bloom of your holiday-spirits in casting your eyes, in that too childish and pastoral manner, “round this sweet landscape, with its myriad blossoms and foliage, its meadows in their golden glory,” etc.; and declaring that all you want other people to do is to “follow out in its concrete results this sense of collective evolution.” Will you only be patient enough, for the help of this old head of mine[180]on stooping shoulders, to tell me one or two of the inconcrete results of separate evolution?Had you done me the honour to walk through my beautifully developing schools, you would have found, just outside of them, (turned out because I’m tired of seeing it, and want something progressive) the cast of the Elgin Theseus. I am tired thereof, it is true; but I don’t yet see my way, as a Professor of Modern Art, to the superseding it. On the whole, it appears to me a very satisfactory type of the human form; arrived at, as you know, two thousand and two hundred years ago. And you tell me, nevertheless, to “see how this transcendent power of collective evolution holdsmein the hollow of its hand!” Well, I hope Iamhandsomer than the Theseus; it’s very pleasant to think so, but it did not strike me before. May I flatter myself it is really your candid opinion? Will you just look at the “Realization of the (your?) Ideal,” in the number of ‘Vanity Fair’ for February 17th, 1872, and confirm me on this point?Granting whatever advance in the ideal of humanity you thus conclude, I still am doubtful of your next reflection. “But these flowers and plants which we can see between the cloisters, and trellised round the grey traceries—” (My dear boy, what haveyouto do with cloisters or traceries? Leave that business to the jackdaws; their loquacious and undeveloped praise is enough for such relics of the barbarous past. You don’t want[181]to shut yourself up, do you? and you couldn’t design a tracery, for your life; and you don’t know a good one from a bad one: what in the name of common sense or common modesty do you mean by chattering about these?) “What races of men in China, Japan, India, Mexico, South America, Australasia, first developed their glory out of some wild bloom?” Frankly, I don’t know—being in this no wiser than you; but also I don’t care: and in this carelessnessamwiser than you, because Idoknow this—that if you will look into the Etruscan room of the British Museum, you will find there an Etruscan Demeter of—any time you please—B.C., riding on a car whose wheels are of wild roses: that the wild rose ofhertime is thus proved to be precisely the wild rose ofmytime, growing behind my study on the hillside; and for my own part, I would not give a spray of it for all Australasia, South America, and Japan together. Perhaps, indeed, apples have improved since the Hesperides’ time; but I know they haven’t improved since I was a boy, and I can’t get a Ribston Pippin, now, for love or money.Of Pippins in Devonshire, of cheese in Cheshire, believe me, my good friend,—though I trust much more than you in the glorified future of both,—you will find no development in the present scientific day;—of Asphodel none; of Apples none demonstrable; but of Eves? From the ductile and silent gold of ancient womanhood to the resonant bronze, and tinkling—not cymbal, but[182]shall we say—saucepan, of Miss Frances Power Cobbe, thereisan interval, with a vengeance; widening to the future. You yourself, I perceive, have no clear insight into this solidified dispersion of the lingering pillar of Salt, whichhadbeen good for hospitality in its day; and which yet would have some honour in its descendant, the poor gleaning Moabitess, into your modern windily progressive pillar of Sand, with “career open to it” indeed other than that of wife and mother—good for nothing, at last, but burial heaps. But are you indeed so proud of what has been already achieved? I will take you on your own terms, and study only the evolution of the Amazonian Virgin. Take first the ancient type of her, leading the lucent Cobbes of her day, ‘florentes aere catervas.’“Bellatrix. Non illa colo, calathisve MinervaeFoemineas assueta manus.Illam omnis tectis agrisqu’ effusa juventusTurbaque miratur matrum; et prospectat euntem.Attonitis inhians animis: ut regius ostroVelet honos leves humeros; ut fibula crinemAuro internectat; Lyciam ut gerat ipsa pharetramEt pastoralem praefixa cuspide myrtum.”With this picture, will you compare that so opportunely furnished me by the author of the ‘Angel in the House,’5of the modern Camilla, in “white[183]bodice, purple knee-breeches, which she had borrowed from an Ethiopian serenader, red stockings, and shoes.” From this sphere of Ethiopian aspiration, may not even the divinely emancipated spirit of Cobbe cast one glance—“Backward, Ho”?But suppose I grant your Evolution of the Japanese Rose, and the Virginian Virago, how of other creatures? of other things? I don’t find the advocates of Evolution much given to studying either men, women, or roses; I perceive them to be mostly occupied with frogs and lice. Is there a Worshipful Batrachianity—a Divine Pedicularity?—Stay, I see at page 874 that Pantheism is “muddled sentiment”; but it was you, my dear boy, who began the muddling with your Japanese horticulture.YourHumanity has no more to do with roses than with Rose-chafers or other vermin; but I must really beg you not to muddle your terms as well as your head. “We, whohavethought and studied,” do not admit that “humanity is an aggregate of men.” An aggregate of men is a mob, and not ‘Humanity’; and an aggregate of sheep is a flock, and not Ovility; and an aggregate of geese is——perhaps you had better consult Mr. Herbert Spencer and the late Mr. John Stuart Mill for the best modern expression,—but if you want to know the proper names for aggregates, in good old English, go and read Lady Juliana’s list in the book of St. Albans.I do not care, however, to pursue questions with you[184]of these ‘concrete developments.’ For, frankly, I conceive myself to know considerably more than you do, of organic Nature and her processes, and of organic English and its processes; but there is one development of which, since it is your special business to know it, and I suppose your pleasure, I hope you know much more than I do, (whose business I find by no means forwarded by it, still less my pleasure)—the Development of Law. For the concrete development of beautifully bewigged humanity, called a lawyer, I beg you to observe that I always express, and feel, extreme respect. But for Law itself, in the existent form of it, invented, as it appears to me, only for the torment and taxation of Humanity, I entertain none whatsoever. I may be wrong, and I don’t want to be wrong; and you, who know the law, can show me if I am wrong or not. Here, then, are four questions of quite vital importance to Humanity, which if you will answer to me positively, you will do more good than I have yet known done by Positivism.1. What is ‘Usury’ as defined by existing Law?2. Is Usury, as defined by existing law, an absolute term, such as Theft, or Adultery? and is a man therefore a Usurer who only commits Usury a little, as a man is an Adulterer who only commits Adultery a little?3. Or is it a sin incapable of strict definition, or strictly retributive punishment; like ‘Cruelty’? and is a man criminal in proportion to the quantity of it he commits?[185]4. If criminal in proportion to the quantity he commits, is the proper legal punishment in the direct ratio of the quantity, or inverse ratio of the quantity, as it is in the case of theft?If you will answer these questions clearly, you will do more service to Humanity than by writing any quantity of papers either on its Collective Development or its Abstract being. I have not touched upon any of the more grave questions glanced at in your paper, because in your present Mercutial temper I cannot expect you to take cognizance of anything grave. With respect to such matters, I will “ask for you to-morrow,” not to-day. But here—to end my Fors with a piece of pure English,—are two little verses of Sir Philip’s, merry enough, in measure, to be set to a Fandango if you like. I may, perhaps, some time or other, ask you if you can apply them personally, in address to Mr. Comte. For the nonce I only ask you the above four plain questions of English law; and I adjure you, by the soul of every Comes reckoned up in unique Comte—by all that’s positive, all that’s progressive, all that’s spiral, all that’s conchoidal, and all that’s evolute—great Human Son of Holothurian Harries, answer me.“Since imprisoned in my motherThou me feed’st, whom have I otherHeld my stay, or made my song?[186]Yea, when all me so misdeemed,I to most a monster seemedYet in thee my hope was strong.Yet of thee the thankful storyFilled my mouth: thy gratious gloryWas my ditty all the day.Do not then, now age assaileth,Courage, verdure, vertue faileth,Do not leave me cast away.”I have little space, as now too often, for any definite school work. My writing-lesson, this month, is a facsimile of the last words written by Nelson; in his cabin, with the allied fleets in sight, off Trafalgar. It is entirely fine in general structure and character.Mr. Ward has now three, and will I hope soon have the fourth, of our series of lesson photographs, namely,—1.Madonna by Filippo Lippi.2.The Etruscan Leucothea.3.Madonna by Titian.4.Infanta Margaret, by Velasquez.On these I shall lecture, as I have time, here and in the ‘Laws of Fésole;’ but, in preparation for all farther study, when you have got the four, put them beside each other, putting the Leucothea first, the Lippi second, and the others as numbered.[187]Then, the first, the Leucothea, is entirely noble religious art, of the fifth or sixth centuryB.C., full of various meaning and mystery, of knowledges that are lost, feelings that have ceased, myths and symbols of the laws of life, only to be traced by those who know much both of life and death.Technically, it is still in Egyptian bondage, but in course of swiftly progressive redemption.The second is nobly religious work of the fifteenth century of Christ,—an example of the most perfect unison of religious myth with faithful realism of human nature yet produced in this world. The Etruscan traditions are preserved in it even to the tassels of the throne cushion: the pattern of these, and of the folds at the edge of the angel’s drapery, may be seen in the Etruscan tomb now central in the first compartment of the Egyptian gallery of the British Museum and the double cushion of that tomb is used, with absolute obedience to his tradition, by Jacopo della Quercia, in the tomb of Ilaria di Caretto.The third represents the last phase of the noble religious art of the world, in which realization has become consummate; but all supernatural aspect is refused, and mythic teaching is given only in obedience to former tradition, but with no anxiety for its acceptance. Here is, for certain, a sweet Venetian peasant, with her child, and fruit from the market-boats of Mestre. The Ecce Agnus, topsy-turvy on the[188]finely perspectived scroll, may be deciphered by whoso list.But the work itself is still sternly conscientious, severe, reverent, and faultless.The fourth is an example of the highest reach of technical perfection yet reached in art; all effort and labour seeming to cease in the radiant peace and simplicity of consummated human power. But all belief in supernatural things, all hope of a future state, all effort to teach, and all desire to be taught have passed away from the artist’s mind. The Child and her Dog are to him equally real, equally royal, equally mortal. And the History of Art since it reached this phase—cannot be given in the present number of ‘Fors Clavigera.’[189]NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.I. Affairs of the Company.No. 50. G. £10 10s.This is a subscription of five guineas for each year: this amount completes that sum (with the £15 15s.which appeared at p. 65, February Fors) for each of the five years.The publication of the following letter, with its answer, will, I hope, not cause Mr. Tarrant any further displeasure. I have only in the outset to correct his statement that the payment of £10 14s.11d.was onmybehalf. It is simply payment to another lawyer. And my first statement was absolutely accurate; I never said Mr. Tarrant had himself taxed, but that he had been “employed in taxing”; I do not concern myself with more careful analysis, when the accounts are all in print. My accusation is against the ‘legal profession generally,’ not against a firm which I have chosen as an entirely trustworthy one, to be employed both in St. George’s business and my own.2, Bond Court, Walbrook,25th April, 1876.Dear Mr. Ruskin,—I have the April ‘Fors,’ in which I see you have published our account of costs against you, amounting to £47 13s.4d.The document was yours, and you had a perfect right to lay it before your readers, but you are the first client who has ever thought it necessary to put such a document of mine to such a use. I don’t know, however, that it will do me any injury, although the statement preceding it is somewhat inaccurate,[190]because our costs of the transfer of the Sheffield property were £26 15s.11d., which included a payment of £10 14s.11d.made on your behalf, leaving our costs at £16 1s., the other portion of the £47 13s.4d.being costs relating to the constitution of the St. George’s Company, leaving altogether £29 14s.11d.only payable to us beyond money paid on your account. It is hardly fair, therefore, to say that Iemployed myselfin taxing the transfer of the property to nearly £50.As to the charge for letters (the writing of which is really not brickmakers’ work), you must bear in mind that the entire of your matters had to be done by correspondence, for which you are fairly chargeable; and I cannot accuse myself of having written a single letter that was unnecessary.As to the position of the St. George’s Company, it is not a legal company, if by that you mean a company recognized by law: it has neither the advantages nor disadvantages of companies incorporated in accordance with the provisions of the several Acts of Parliament relating to such matters. It is not a legal trust of a charitable nature, if by that term be meant a trust which is liable to the supervision or interference of the Charity Commissioners. It is a number of persons unincorporated, but associated for other purposes than that of gain. It is on a similar footing to such a society as that for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. The Master will be personally responsible for the debts of the Company contracted by his order. If you desire to have a legal-Company, or the supervision of the Charity Commissioners, you must give way in many points which you have hitherto considered indispensable to your scheme. On the 29th February last we sent you a specimen of the form in which we proposed to draw up the memorandum for each Companion to subscribe. If you will return us this with any remarks upon it which may occur to you, we will at once have it engrossed, and send it you to be signed by all the Companions.[191]We were expecting a call from you when you were in town some time since, and should have then have discussed this subject with you, and also the subject of the trust deed which will have to be executed by the Master of the Company.We will act upon your suggestion, and forward the deed of the Sheffield property to Mr. Bagshawe. Shall I also send all the title deeds to him relating to the property? Tell me this.Faithfully yours,W. P. Tarrant.Professor Ruskin,Arthur Severn, Esq., Herne Hill, S.E.(Answer.)Patterdale,6th May, 1876Dear Mr. Tarrant,—I was surprised and vexed by the opening of your letter of 25th April, showing that you had not in the least hitherto understood the scope or meaning of my present work. There is not the smallest unfriendliness in my publication of your account. No client ever had occasion to do it before, of course;—you never had a client before engaged in steady and lifelong contest with the existing principles of the Law, the Church, and the Army,—had you? The publication of your accounts of course can do you no harm, if they are fair; nor have, or had I, the slightest idea of their being otherwise. All accounts for St. George are to be printed: the senders-in must look to the consequences.The delay in my returning your draft of the rules of Company is because every lawyer I speak to tells me of a new difficulty. The whole piece of business, you remember, arose from my request to you simply to secure a piece of ground to our trustees, which had been given us by Mr. Baker. Now I find at the last moment that neither Mr. Baker nor anybody else cangiveus a piece of land at all, but must sell it us.Next, I want to know if this form, as you have drawn it up,[192]is approved by me, what are you going to do with it? What is the good of it? Will the writing of it in black letter make us a legal company, like a railway company, capable of holding land? Do the Charity Commissioners interfere withtheirbusiness? or must we blow some people to bits or smash them into jelly, to prove our want of charity,—and get leave, therefore, to do what we like with our own?Fix your minds, and Mr. Barber’s, on this one point—the grip of the land. If you can’t give us that, send us in your accounts, and let us be done with the matter. If you can, on the document as it stands, write it out on the rubbish your modern stationers call parchment, and do what you will with it, so.I am really ashamed to give any farther account, just now, of the delays in our land work, or of little crosses and worries blocking my first attempt at practice. One of the men whom I thought I had ready for this Worcestershire land, being ordered, for trial, to do a little bit of rough work in Yorkshire that I might not torment Mr. Baker with his freshmanship, threw up the task at once, writing me a long letter of which one sentence was enough for me,—that “he would dohis share, but no more.” These infernal notions of Equality and Independence are so rooted, now, even in the best men’s minds, that they don’t so much as know even what Obedience or Fellowship mean! Fancy one of Nelson’s or Lord Cochrane’s men retreating from his gun, with the avowed resolution to ‘do no more than his share’! However, I know there’s good in this man, and I doubt not he will repent, and break down no more; but I shall not try him again for a year. And I must be forgiven my St. George’s accounts this month. I really can’t let the orchises and hyacinths go out of flower while I’m trying to cast sums; and I’ve been two whole days at work on the[193]purple marsh orchis alone, which my botanical readers will please observe is in St. George’s schools to be called ‘Porphyria veris,’ ‘Spring Purplet.’ It is, I believe, Ophelia’s “long purple.” There are a quantity of new names to be invented for the whole tribe, their present ones being not by St. George endurable.The subjoined letter gives me great pleasure: it is from a son of my earliest Oxford friend: who, as his father helped me in educating myself, is now helping me in the education of others. I print it entire; it may give some of my readers an idea of the minor hindrances which meet one at every step, and take as much time to conquer as large ones. The work to be done is to place a series of the simple chemical elements as ‘Imps’ in a pretty row of poetical Bottles at Sheffield.“Broad Street, Oxford,March 30, 1876.“My dear Mr. Ruskin,—I knocked in vain at your ‘oak’ last night when I came to Corpus to report progress, and also to ask you two questions, which must be put to you by letter, as there is not much time to lose if you wish to have the alkaline earths ready by the time you go to Sheffield. Firstly, do you wish me to see about getting themetalsof the alkalies, and if so which of them do you want? Some of them are extremely expensive,—calcium, for instance, being 2d.a grain; but then, as it is very light a very small quantity would be required as a specimen. The other questions were about the amount of the oxides, and about the shape of the bottles to hold them. I have in your absence chosen some long sample bottles which are very beautiful of their kind, and even if they do not meet your approval they can easily be changed when you return to Oxford. I am progressing fairly well with the earths—Magnesia is ready; Alumina and Baryta partly made, but not yet pure, for it is not more easy in chemistry to get a perfect thing than in any other matter with which man has anything to do, and to-day I have been extremely unfortunate[194]with the Baryta, having tried two methods of making it, broken four crucibles, and, worst of all, failed to make it in a state of purity: however I shall have one more try to-morrow, and no doubt shall succeed. If there is any chance of your being in Oxford before Easter, I will not make the Silica, since the process is very beautiful, and one which no doubt you would like to see. Please excuse the length of my letter, and believe me,“Affectionately yours,“Theodore D. Acland.”II. Affairs of the Master.I am aghast at the columnar aspect of any account given in satisfactory detail; and will only gradually, as I have space, illustrate my own expenditure and its course. That unexplained hundred of last month, diminished itself, I find, thus:£s.d.Pocket1000Klein, (final account on dismissal to Rotterdam, paying his passage, and a shilling or two over)3000Downs, for my London quarterly pensioners2500Morley, (Oxford bookbinding)316Easter presents5007316Leaving a balance of26186to be added to the £200 of personal expenses in this month’s accounts. About a hundred and twenty of this has gone in a fortnight’s posting, with Mr. and Mrs. Severn, from London to Coniston, stopping to see St. Albans, Peterborough, Croyland, Stamford and Burleigh, Grantham, Newark, Lincoln, our new ground at Sheffield, Pomfret, Knaresborough, Ripon, Fountain’s, Richmond, Mortham Tower, and Brougham Castle. A pleasant life, you think? Yes,—if I led an unpleasant one, however dutiful, I could not write any of my books, least of all, Fors. But I am glad, if you honestly think it a pleasant life;why, if[195]so, my richer readers, do you drive only round the parks, every day, instead of from place to place through England, learning a thing or two on the road? Of the rest of the ‘self’ money, I leave further account till next month: it is not all gone yet. I give, however, for a typical example, one of Downs’s weekly bills, reaching the symmetrical total of £7 7s.7d., or a guinea and a penny a day, which I think is about the average. Of the persons named therein as receiving weekly wage, Hersey is our old under-gardener, now rheumatic, and as little able to earn his dinner as I am myself; Rusch, my old lapidary, who cuts in the course of the week what pebbles he can for me; Best, an old coachman, who used to come to us from livery-stable on occasion, and now can’t drive any more; Christy, an old woman who used to work for my mother.1876.£s.d.April22.Cash in hand3012829.Men’s Wages410Coachman’s Book11610Charities0160Sundries0139£777April29.Balance in hand£2351Men’s Wages.£s.d.April29.David Downs1150Thomas Hersey150John Rusch110£410Coachman’s Book.£s.d.April29.Plate Powder, 1s.; Oil, 10d.0110Soap and Sand010Wages1140£11610[196]Charities.£s.d.William Best0100Mrs. Christy060£0160Sundries.£s.d.April22.Postage00524.Rail and ’Bus, British Museum010Cord for Boxes, 1s.6d.; Postage, 1s.6½d.030½25.Horse and Cart, Boxes to Station076Carman, 1s.; Booking ditto, 6d.016Postage00126and 28. Postage002½£0139After thus much of miniature illustration, I have only to explain of the broad effects in the account below, that my Oxford secretary, who has £200 a year, does such work for me connected with my Professorship as only a trained scholar could do, leaving me free here to study hyacinths. I wish I could give him the Professorship itself, but must do as I am bid by Oxford. My younger secretary, who has £100 a year, is this year put into office, for St. George’s correspondence; and I must beg my good friends—now, I am thankful to say, gathering a little to St. George’s work,—not to think themselves slighted in being answered by his hand, for mine is weary.1876.£s.d.April16.Balance1511101May1.Half-year’s Stipend of Slade Professorship179001690101464110Balance, May 16th£1225191[197]April20and 30. Self2000020.Downs500022.Photographs (Leucothea and Lippi)165025.Tailor’s Account3360May 1.Oxford Secretary100001.Raffaelle for May and June150015.Burgess5000£464110III.“Hastings,May 15.“My dear Ruskin,—I enclose two extracts, cut from the same day’s paper, which contain so grimly humorous a parallel between the ways in which the ‘Protestant Church’ and ‘the world’ are engaged in ‘obliterating all traces of the Virgin Mary,’ that I thought you might possibly use them in ‘Fors’ or elsewhere.“Yours affectionately,“C. Patmore.”(The following are the two extracts. Before giving them, I must reply to my greatly honoured and loved friend, that both the Bristol destroyers of images and New York destroyers of humanity, are simply—Lost Sheep of the great Catholic Church; account of whom will be required atherhand.)“Iconoclasm at Bristol.—Our Bristol correspondent writes: The removal of the ‘imagery’ from the north porch of Bristol Cathedral has created considerable excitement in the city and in Clifton. As a member of the capitular body who is known to strongly object to the figures was seen near the Cathedral late on Wednesday night, the clerk of the works employed ‘watchers,’ his intention being to refuse admission to other than his own workmen. On Thursday morning he had occasion to leave the works to go to the quarries at Corsham, and while he was absent a gang of men, under the orders of the chapter clerk, entered the gates, and before the clerk of the works, who was telegraphed for, could[198]return, hauled down the four statues andobliterated all traces of the Virgin Mary, doing much damage to other carving in the process of removal. The last has by no means been heard of this affair. The statues cost over £100 each, but the money value of the ‘imagery’ is not considered by the Restoration Committee. Their contention is that, until the work was completed and handed over to the Cathedral body, it belonged to the Restoration Committee; and it is believed that the right of the Chapter to act as they have done will be tested in a court of law. Feeling is so strong against the action of the Dean and Chapter that plenty of money would be forthcoming to prosecute such an inquiry.”—Pall Mall Gazette, April 7, 1876.“One of the latest ‘sensations’ in New York has been a ‘female boxing match,’ aptly described by theNew York Timesas a ‘novel and nonsensical exhibition.’ The combatants—or ‘lady contestants,’ as they are called in the report of the proceedings—were two ballet-girls, of the kind known as ‘variety dancers.’ One, Miss Saunders, wore a white bodice, purple knee-breeches, which she had borrowed from an Ethiopian serenader, red stockings, and shoes. The other, Miss Harland, was attired in blue trunks and white tights. Both appeared nervous, were very pale, tried to blush, and ‘partially succeeded.’ When the fighting began, Miss Harland ‘did not know what to do with her hands.’ Miss Saunders, however, had her fists more at command, and, after some preliminary sparring, succeeded in striking her opponent ‘square in the face.’ Miss Harland, on her side, ‘by a vicious blow from the shoulder,’ managed to disarrange Miss Saunders’s back hair. Both ladies then smiled. In the end Miss Harland lost the match, ‘owing to her confirmed habit of swinging her hands around in the air.’ Miss Saunders was declared the winner, and carried off a prize of 200 dols. and a piece of silver plate; Miss Harland received[199]a ten-dollar bill from an amateur who thought she deserved consolation; and the two ‘lady contestants’ left the stage arm-in-arm.”—Pall Mall Gazette, April 7, 1876.IV. In last Fors, though I thought I knew my ‘Old Mortality’ well enough, I carelessly wrote ‘Elspeth,’ for ‘Elizabeth,’ (meaning Bessie Maclure); and the misprint ‘Arannah’ for ‘Araunah’ escaped my eyes three times over. The more grotesque one of ‘changes’ for ‘charges,’ in p. 168, line 25, was I suppose appointed by Fors to chastise me for incurable flirtation. I wish I knew who these two schoolgirls are, whom I’ve got to finish my letter to if I can, this time.My dears, will you please, for I can’t rewrite what I’ve said so often, read, when you have opportunity, the letter to a young lady in Fors 34, pp. 29, 30.6Respecting the third article in that letter, I have now a few words to add; (read also, if you can, what is said of the Word of God, in Letters 45 and 46). I told you in last Fors that you would have great difficulty in getting leave from English society to obey Christ. Fors has since sent me, in support of this statement, a paper called ‘The Christian,’—the number for Thursday, May 11,—in the fifteenth page of which is an article on young ladies headed “What can they do?” from which I take the following passage:—“There have been times of special prayer for young men and women. Could there not be also for the very large class of young ladies who do not go out into society? They have no home duties to detain them, as many in a humbler condition; they have hours and hours of leisure, and know not how to spend them—partly from need of being directed, but more so from the prejudices[200]and hindrances in their way. Their hearts are burning to do something for Christ, but they are not allowed, partly because it is considered ‘improper,’ and for a variety of reasons.“There is a cry on every side for labourers. There are numbers longing to respond; if not wholly to dedicate their lives, at least a portion of their days, to active Christian service, and only a wave of united prayer can throw these objections aside, and free the large band who are so willing.“A bright young Christian came to me this week. She is tired of meetings to which she is constantly taken, but never allowed to work in the inquiry-room at them,—hindered from taking up the least bit of work, till at last she cannot evenaskfor it. Almost to ‘kill time,’ she has taken up a secular corresponding agency.”Now that it is ‘considered improper’ by the world that you should do anything for Christ, is entirely true, and always true; and therefore it was that your Godfathers and Godmothers, in your name, renounced the “vain pomp and glory of the world,” with all covetous desires of the same—see baptismal service—(I wonder if you had pretty names—won’t you tell me?) but I much doubt if you, either privately or from the pulpit of your doubtless charming church, have ever been taught what the “vain pomp and glory of the world” was.Well, do you want to be better dressed than your schoolfellows? Some of them are probably poor, and cannot afford to dress like you; or, on the other hand, you may be poor yourselves, and may be mortified at their being dressed better than you. Putanend to all that at once, by resolving to go down into the deep of your girl’s heart, where you will find, inlaid by Christ’s own hand, a better thing than vanity; pity. And be sure of this, that, although in a truly Christian land, every young girl would be dressed beautifully and delightfully,—in this entirely heathen and Baal-worshipping land of ours, not one girl in ten has either decent or healthy clothing, and that you have no[201]business now to wear anything fine yourself, but are bound to use your full strength and resources to dress as many of your poor neighbours as you can. What of fine dress your people insist upon your wearing, take—and wear proudly and prettily, for their sakes; but, so far as in you lies, be sure that every day you are labouring to clothe some poorer creatures. And if you cannot clothe, at least help, with your hands. You can make your own bed; wash your own plate; brighten your own furniture,—if nothing else.‘But that’s servant’s work’? Of course it is. What business have you to hope to be better than a servant of servants? ‘God made you a lady’? Yes, he has put you, that is to say, in a position in which you may learn to speak your own language beautifully; to be accurately acquainted with the elements of other languages; to behave with grace, tact, and sympathy to all around you; to know the history of your country, the commands of its religion, and the duties of its race. If you obey His will in learning these things, you will obtain the power of becoming a true ‘lady;’ and you will become one, if while you learn these things you set yourself, with all the strength of your youth and womanhood, to serve His servants, until the day come when He calls you to say, “Well done, good and faithful servant: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”You may thus become a Christ’s lady, or you may, if you will, become a Belial’s lady, taking Belial’s gift of miserable idleness, living on the labour and shame of others, anddeceivingthem and yourself by lies about Providence, until you perish in hell with the rest of such, shrieking the bitter cry, “When saw weThee?”V.“3, Athole Crescent, Perth,10th May, 1876.“Sir,—Thinking that it may interest you, I take the liberty of writing to let you know that the ‘Lead’ is not at all in the state[202]you suppose it to be; but still runs down, very clear, by the side of the North Inch and past Rose Terrace, and, judging from the numbers of them at this moment playing by it, affords no small delight to the children.“I am, yours most respectfully,“A Reader of ‘Fors.’”VI.“Easthampstead Rectory, Bracknell,“April 20, 1876.“My dear Ruskin,—I have just received this month’s ‘Fors,’ but not read it, (of course not; my friends never do, except to find the mistakes,) as I am off to Dublin, but as regards Psalm lxxxvii., (note, p. 110,) I expounded it in a sermon some time since, and was talking of it to a very learned Hebraist last Monday. Rahab, there, is generally understood to mean ‘the monster,’ and has nothing to do, beyond resemblance of sound, with Rahab the harlot. And the monster is the crocodile, as typical of Egypt. In Psalm lxxxix. 10, (the Bible version, not the Prayer Book,) you will see Rahab explained in the margin, by ‘or Egypt.’“Perhaps Rahab the harlot was called by the same name from the rapacity of her class, just as in Latinlupa.“The whole Psalm is badly translated, and, as we have it, unintelligible. But it is really charged with deep prophetical meaning. I cannot write more, so believe me,“Ever yours affectionately,“O. Gordon.“I hope you will have had a pleasant journey when you receive this. The Greek Septuagint is much better than the English, but not good. As regards the general meaning, you have divined it very correctly.”[203]1‘Early History of Mankind,’ (a book of rare value and research, however,) p. 379.↑2In the meantime, if any of my readers will look at the leading articles of the ‘Monetary Gazette,’ whose editor I thank with all my heart and soul, for the first honest commercial statements I ever saw in English journals, they will get sufficient light on such matters.↑3Corr., Art. VI.↑4See, on that subject, the third number of Deucalion.↑5Article III. of Correspondence.↑6I should like my lady readers in general to have, of back Fors numbers, at least, 30, 34, 36, 45, 46, and 48: those who have the complete book should scratch out the eleventh line in p. 18 of the last Index, and put the 10th line of it thus: “Ladies, and girls, advice to,30, 2;34, 29;45, 212;48, 271.”↑

LETTER LXVI.Brantwood,14th May, 1876.Those of my readers who have followed me as far as I have hitherto gone in our careful reading of the Pentateuch, must, I think, have felt with me, in natural consequence of this careful reading, more than hitherto, the life and reality of the record; but, in the degree of this new life, new wonderfulness, and difficult credibility! For it is always easy to imagine that we believe what we do not understand; and often graceful and convenient to consent in the belief of others, as to what we do not care about. But when we begin to know clearly what is told, the question if it be fable or fact becomes inevitable in our minds; and if the fact, once admitted, would bear upon our conduct, its admission can no longer be made a matter of mere social courtesy.Accordingly, I find one of my more earnest readers[172]already asking me, privately, if I really believed that the hail on Good Friday last had been sent as a punishment for national sin?—and I should think, and even hope, that other of my readers would like to ask me, respecting the same passage, whether I believed that the sun ever stood still?To whom I could only answer, what I answered some time since in my paper on Miracle for the Metaphysical Society, (‘Contemporary Review’) that the true miracle, to my mind, would not be in the sun’s standing still, but IS in its going on! We are all of us being swept down to death in a sea of miracle; we are drowned in wonder, as gnats in a Rhine whirlpool: unless we are worse,—drowned in pleasure, or sloth, or insolence.Nevertheless, I do not feel myself in the least called upon to believe that the sun stood still, or the earth either, during that pursuit at Ajalon. Nay, it would not anywise amaze me to find that there never had been any such pursuit—never any Joshua, never any Moses; and that the Jews, “taken generally,” as an amiable clerical friend told me from his pulpit a Sunday or two ago, “were a Christian people.”But it does amaze me—almost to helplessness of hand and thought—to find the men and women of these days careless of such issue; and content, so that they can feed and breathe their fill, to eat like cattle, and breathe like plants, questionless of the Spirit that makes the grass to grow for them on the mountains, or the[173]breeze they breathe on them, its messengers, or the fire that dresses their food, its minister. Desolate souls, for whom the sun—beneath, not above, the horizon—stands still for ever.‘Amazed,’ I say, ‘almost to helplessness of hand and thought’—quite literally of both. I was reading yesterday, by Fors’ order, Mr. Edward B. Tylor’s idea of the Greek faith in Apollo: “If the sun travels along its course like a glittering chariot, forthwith the wheels, and the driver, and the horses are there;”1and Mr. Frederick Harrison’s gushing article on Humanity, in the ‘Contemporary Review’; and a letter about our Cotton Industry, (hereafter to be quoted,2) and this presently following bit of Sir Philip Sidney’s 68th Psalm;—and my hands are cold this morning, after the horror, and wonder, and puzzlement of my total Sun-less-day, and my head is now standing still, or at least turning round, giddy, instead of doing its work by Shrewsbury clock; and I don’t know where to begin with the quantity I want to say,—all the less that I’ve said a great deal of it before, if I only knew where to tell you to find it. All up and down my later books, from ‘Unto This Last’ to ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ and again and again throughout ‘Fors,’[174]you will find references to the practical connection between physical and spiritual light—of which now I would fain state, in the most unmistakable terms, this sum: that you cannot love the real sun, that is to say physical light and colour, rightly, unless you love the spiritual sun, that is to say justice and truth, rightly. That for unjust and untrue persons, there is no real joy in physical light, so that they don’t even know what the word means. That the entire system of modern life is so corrupted with the ghastliest forms of injustice and untruth, carried to the point of not recognising themselves as either—for as long as Bill Sykes knows that he is a robber, and Jeremy Diddler that he is a rascal, there is still some of Heaven’s light left for both—but when everybody steals, cheats, and goes to church, complacently, and the light of their whole body is darkness, how great is that darkness! And that the physical result of that mental vileness is a total carelessness of the beauty of sky, or the cleanness of streams, or the life of animals and flowers: and I believe that the powers of Nature are depressed or perverted, together with the Spirit of Man; and therefore that conditions of storm and of physical darkness, such as never were before in Christian times, are developing themselves, in connection also with forms of loathsome insanity, multiplying through the whole genesis of modern brains.As I correct this sheet for press, I chance, by Fors’[175]order, in a prayer of St. John Damascene’s to the Virgin, on this, to me, very curious and interesting clause: “Redeem me from the dark metamorphosis of the angels, rescuing me from the bitter law-giving of the farmers of the air, and the rulers of the darkness.”“τῆς σκοτεινῆς με τῶν διαμόνων λυτρου μέτημορφῆς, (I am not answerable either for Damascene Greek, or for my MS. of it, in 1396,)τοῦ πικροτάτου λογοθεσίου τῶν τελωνῶν τοῦ ἀέρος καὶ τῶν ἀρχόντων τοῦ σκότους ἐξαίρουσα.”And now—of this entangling in the shrine of half born and half-sighted things, see this piece of Sir Philip Sidney’s psalm. I want it also for the bit of conchology at the end. The italics are mine.“And call ye this to utter what is just,You that of justice hold the sov’raign throne?And call yee this to yield, O sonnes of dust,To wronged brethren ev’ry one his own?O no: it is your long malicious willNow to the world to make by practice known,With whose oppression you the ballance fill,Just to your selves, indiff’rent else to none.But what could they, who ev’n in birth declin’d,From truth and right to lies and injuries?To shew thevenom of their cancred myndThe adder’s image scarcely can suffice.[176]Nay, scarce the aspick may with them contend,On whom the charmer all in vaine appliesHis skillful’st spells: aye, missing of his end,While sheeself-deaf, and unaffectedlies.Lord, crack their teeth, Lord, crush Thou these lions’ jawes,Soe lett them sinck as water in the sand:When deadly bow their aiming fury drawes,Shiver the shaft, ere past the shooter’s hand.So make them melt as the dishowsed snaile,Or as the embrio, whose vitall bandBreakes ere it holdes, and formlesse eyes doe faileTo see the sun, though brought to lightfull land.”‘Dishoused’ snail! That’s a bit, observe, of Sir Philip’s own natural history, perfecting the image in the psalm, “as a snail which melteth.” The ‘housed’ snail can shelter himself from evil weather, but the poor houseless slug, a mere slimy mass of helpless blackness,—shower-begotten, as it seems,—what is to become ofitwhen the sun is up!Not that even houseless snails melt,—nor that there’s anything about snails at all in David’s psalm, I believe, both Vulgate and LXX. saying ‘wax’ instead, as in Psalms lxviii. 2, xcvii. 5, etc.; but I suppose there’s some reptilian sense in the Hebrew, justifying our translation here—all the more interesting to me[177]because of a puzzle I got into in Isaiah, the other day; respecting which, lest you should fancy I’m too ready to give up Joshua and the sun without taking trouble about them, please observe this very certain condition of your Scriptural studies: that if you read the Bible with predetermination to pick out every text you approve of—that is to say, generally, any that confirm you in the conceit of your own religious sect,—that console you for the consequences of your own faults,—or assure you of a pleasant future though you attend to none of your present duties—on these terms you will find the Bible entirely intelligible, and wholly delightful: but if you read it with a real purpose of trying to understand it, and obey; and so read it all through, steadily, you will find it, out and out, the crabbedest and most difficult book you ever tried; horribly ill written in many parts, according to all human canons; totally unintelligible in others; and with the gold of it only to be got at by a process of crushing in which nothing but the iron teeth of the fiercest and honestest resolution will prevail against its adamant.For instance, take the 16th of Isaiah. Who is to send the Lamb? why is the Lamb to be sent? what does the Lamb mean? There is nothing in the Greek Bible about a Lamb at all, nor is anybody told to send anything. But God saysHewill send something, apostolically, as reptiles!Then, are the daughters of Moab the outcasts, as[178]in the second verse, or other people, as in the fourth? How is Moab’s throne to be established in righteousness, in the tabernacle of David, in the fifth? What are his lies not to be, in the sixth? And why is he to howl for himself, in the seventh? Ask any of the young jackanapes you put up to chatter out of your pulpits, to tell you even so much as this, of the first half-dozen verses! But above all, ask them who the persons are who are to be sent apostolically as reptiles?Meanwhile, on the way to answer, I’ve got a letter,3not from a jackanapes, but a thoroughly learned and modest clergyman, and old friend, advising me of my mistake in April Fors, in supposing that Rahab, in the 89th Psalm, means the harlot. It is, he tells me, a Hebrew word for the Dragon adversary, as in the verse “He hath cut Rahab, and wounded the Dragon.” That will come all the clearer and prettier for us, when we have worked it out, with Rahab herself and all; meantime, please observe what a busy creature she must have been—the stalks of her flax in heaps enough to hide the messengers! doubtless also, she was able to dye her thread of the brightest scarlet, a becoming colour.4Well, I can’t get that paper of Mr. Frederick Harrison’s out of my head; chiefly because I know and like its writer; and Idon’tlike his wasting his time in writing[179]that sort of stuff. What I have got to say to him, anent it, may better be said publicly, because I must write it carefully, and with some fulness; and if he won’t attend to me, perhaps some of his readers may. So I consider him, for the time, as one of my acquaintances among working men, and dedicate the close of this letter to him specially.My dear Harrison,—I am very glad you have been enjoying yourself at Oxford; and that you still think it a pretty place. But why, in the name of all that’s developing, did you walk in those wretched old Magdalen walks? They’re as dull as they were thirty years ago. Why didn’t you promenade in our new street, opposite Mr. Ryman’s? or under the rapturous sanctities of Keble? or beneath the lively new zigzag parapet of Tom Quad?—or, finally, in the name of all that’s human and progressive, why not up and down the elongating suburb of the married Fellows, on the cock-horse road to Banbury?However, I’m glad you’ve been at the old place; even though you wasted the bloom of your holiday-spirits in casting your eyes, in that too childish and pastoral manner, “round this sweet landscape, with its myriad blossoms and foliage, its meadows in their golden glory,” etc.; and declaring that all you want other people to do is to “follow out in its concrete results this sense of collective evolution.” Will you only be patient enough, for the help of this old head of mine[180]on stooping shoulders, to tell me one or two of the inconcrete results of separate evolution?Had you done me the honour to walk through my beautifully developing schools, you would have found, just outside of them, (turned out because I’m tired of seeing it, and want something progressive) the cast of the Elgin Theseus. I am tired thereof, it is true; but I don’t yet see my way, as a Professor of Modern Art, to the superseding it. On the whole, it appears to me a very satisfactory type of the human form; arrived at, as you know, two thousand and two hundred years ago. And you tell me, nevertheless, to “see how this transcendent power of collective evolution holdsmein the hollow of its hand!” Well, I hope Iamhandsomer than the Theseus; it’s very pleasant to think so, but it did not strike me before. May I flatter myself it is really your candid opinion? Will you just look at the “Realization of the (your?) Ideal,” in the number of ‘Vanity Fair’ for February 17th, 1872, and confirm me on this point?Granting whatever advance in the ideal of humanity you thus conclude, I still am doubtful of your next reflection. “But these flowers and plants which we can see between the cloisters, and trellised round the grey traceries—” (My dear boy, what haveyouto do with cloisters or traceries? Leave that business to the jackdaws; their loquacious and undeveloped praise is enough for such relics of the barbarous past. You don’t want[181]to shut yourself up, do you? and you couldn’t design a tracery, for your life; and you don’t know a good one from a bad one: what in the name of common sense or common modesty do you mean by chattering about these?) “What races of men in China, Japan, India, Mexico, South America, Australasia, first developed their glory out of some wild bloom?” Frankly, I don’t know—being in this no wiser than you; but also I don’t care: and in this carelessnessamwiser than you, because Idoknow this—that if you will look into the Etruscan room of the British Museum, you will find there an Etruscan Demeter of—any time you please—B.C., riding on a car whose wheels are of wild roses: that the wild rose ofhertime is thus proved to be precisely the wild rose ofmytime, growing behind my study on the hillside; and for my own part, I would not give a spray of it for all Australasia, South America, and Japan together. Perhaps, indeed, apples have improved since the Hesperides’ time; but I know they haven’t improved since I was a boy, and I can’t get a Ribston Pippin, now, for love or money.Of Pippins in Devonshire, of cheese in Cheshire, believe me, my good friend,—though I trust much more than you in the glorified future of both,—you will find no development in the present scientific day;—of Asphodel none; of Apples none demonstrable; but of Eves? From the ductile and silent gold of ancient womanhood to the resonant bronze, and tinkling—not cymbal, but[182]shall we say—saucepan, of Miss Frances Power Cobbe, thereisan interval, with a vengeance; widening to the future. You yourself, I perceive, have no clear insight into this solidified dispersion of the lingering pillar of Salt, whichhadbeen good for hospitality in its day; and which yet would have some honour in its descendant, the poor gleaning Moabitess, into your modern windily progressive pillar of Sand, with “career open to it” indeed other than that of wife and mother—good for nothing, at last, but burial heaps. But are you indeed so proud of what has been already achieved? I will take you on your own terms, and study only the evolution of the Amazonian Virgin. Take first the ancient type of her, leading the lucent Cobbes of her day, ‘florentes aere catervas.’“Bellatrix. Non illa colo, calathisve MinervaeFoemineas assueta manus.Illam omnis tectis agrisqu’ effusa juventusTurbaque miratur matrum; et prospectat euntem.Attonitis inhians animis: ut regius ostroVelet honos leves humeros; ut fibula crinemAuro internectat; Lyciam ut gerat ipsa pharetramEt pastoralem praefixa cuspide myrtum.”With this picture, will you compare that so opportunely furnished me by the author of the ‘Angel in the House,’5of the modern Camilla, in “white[183]bodice, purple knee-breeches, which she had borrowed from an Ethiopian serenader, red stockings, and shoes.” From this sphere of Ethiopian aspiration, may not even the divinely emancipated spirit of Cobbe cast one glance—“Backward, Ho”?But suppose I grant your Evolution of the Japanese Rose, and the Virginian Virago, how of other creatures? of other things? I don’t find the advocates of Evolution much given to studying either men, women, or roses; I perceive them to be mostly occupied with frogs and lice. Is there a Worshipful Batrachianity—a Divine Pedicularity?—Stay, I see at page 874 that Pantheism is “muddled sentiment”; but it was you, my dear boy, who began the muddling with your Japanese horticulture.YourHumanity has no more to do with roses than with Rose-chafers or other vermin; but I must really beg you not to muddle your terms as well as your head. “We, whohavethought and studied,” do not admit that “humanity is an aggregate of men.” An aggregate of men is a mob, and not ‘Humanity’; and an aggregate of sheep is a flock, and not Ovility; and an aggregate of geese is——perhaps you had better consult Mr. Herbert Spencer and the late Mr. John Stuart Mill for the best modern expression,—but if you want to know the proper names for aggregates, in good old English, go and read Lady Juliana’s list in the book of St. Albans.I do not care, however, to pursue questions with you[184]of these ‘concrete developments.’ For, frankly, I conceive myself to know considerably more than you do, of organic Nature and her processes, and of organic English and its processes; but there is one development of which, since it is your special business to know it, and I suppose your pleasure, I hope you know much more than I do, (whose business I find by no means forwarded by it, still less my pleasure)—the Development of Law. For the concrete development of beautifully bewigged humanity, called a lawyer, I beg you to observe that I always express, and feel, extreme respect. But for Law itself, in the existent form of it, invented, as it appears to me, only for the torment and taxation of Humanity, I entertain none whatsoever. I may be wrong, and I don’t want to be wrong; and you, who know the law, can show me if I am wrong or not. Here, then, are four questions of quite vital importance to Humanity, which if you will answer to me positively, you will do more good than I have yet known done by Positivism.1. What is ‘Usury’ as defined by existing Law?2. Is Usury, as defined by existing law, an absolute term, such as Theft, or Adultery? and is a man therefore a Usurer who only commits Usury a little, as a man is an Adulterer who only commits Adultery a little?3. Or is it a sin incapable of strict definition, or strictly retributive punishment; like ‘Cruelty’? and is a man criminal in proportion to the quantity of it he commits?[185]4. If criminal in proportion to the quantity he commits, is the proper legal punishment in the direct ratio of the quantity, or inverse ratio of the quantity, as it is in the case of theft?If you will answer these questions clearly, you will do more service to Humanity than by writing any quantity of papers either on its Collective Development or its Abstract being. I have not touched upon any of the more grave questions glanced at in your paper, because in your present Mercutial temper I cannot expect you to take cognizance of anything grave. With respect to such matters, I will “ask for you to-morrow,” not to-day. But here—to end my Fors with a piece of pure English,—are two little verses of Sir Philip’s, merry enough, in measure, to be set to a Fandango if you like. I may, perhaps, some time or other, ask you if you can apply them personally, in address to Mr. Comte. For the nonce I only ask you the above four plain questions of English law; and I adjure you, by the soul of every Comes reckoned up in unique Comte—by all that’s positive, all that’s progressive, all that’s spiral, all that’s conchoidal, and all that’s evolute—great Human Son of Holothurian Harries, answer me.“Since imprisoned in my motherThou me feed’st, whom have I otherHeld my stay, or made my song?[186]Yea, when all me so misdeemed,I to most a monster seemedYet in thee my hope was strong.Yet of thee the thankful storyFilled my mouth: thy gratious gloryWas my ditty all the day.Do not then, now age assaileth,Courage, verdure, vertue faileth,Do not leave me cast away.”I have little space, as now too often, for any definite school work. My writing-lesson, this month, is a facsimile of the last words written by Nelson; in his cabin, with the allied fleets in sight, off Trafalgar. It is entirely fine in general structure and character.Mr. Ward has now three, and will I hope soon have the fourth, of our series of lesson photographs, namely,—1.Madonna by Filippo Lippi.2.The Etruscan Leucothea.3.Madonna by Titian.4.Infanta Margaret, by Velasquez.On these I shall lecture, as I have time, here and in the ‘Laws of Fésole;’ but, in preparation for all farther study, when you have got the four, put them beside each other, putting the Leucothea first, the Lippi second, and the others as numbered.[187]Then, the first, the Leucothea, is entirely noble religious art, of the fifth or sixth centuryB.C., full of various meaning and mystery, of knowledges that are lost, feelings that have ceased, myths and symbols of the laws of life, only to be traced by those who know much both of life and death.Technically, it is still in Egyptian bondage, but in course of swiftly progressive redemption.The second is nobly religious work of the fifteenth century of Christ,—an example of the most perfect unison of religious myth with faithful realism of human nature yet produced in this world. The Etruscan traditions are preserved in it even to the tassels of the throne cushion: the pattern of these, and of the folds at the edge of the angel’s drapery, may be seen in the Etruscan tomb now central in the first compartment of the Egyptian gallery of the British Museum and the double cushion of that tomb is used, with absolute obedience to his tradition, by Jacopo della Quercia, in the tomb of Ilaria di Caretto.The third represents the last phase of the noble religious art of the world, in which realization has become consummate; but all supernatural aspect is refused, and mythic teaching is given only in obedience to former tradition, but with no anxiety for its acceptance. Here is, for certain, a sweet Venetian peasant, with her child, and fruit from the market-boats of Mestre. The Ecce Agnus, topsy-turvy on the[188]finely perspectived scroll, may be deciphered by whoso list.But the work itself is still sternly conscientious, severe, reverent, and faultless.The fourth is an example of the highest reach of technical perfection yet reached in art; all effort and labour seeming to cease in the radiant peace and simplicity of consummated human power. But all belief in supernatural things, all hope of a future state, all effort to teach, and all desire to be taught have passed away from the artist’s mind. The Child and her Dog are to him equally real, equally royal, equally mortal. And the History of Art since it reached this phase—cannot be given in the present number of ‘Fors Clavigera.’[189]NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.I. Affairs of the Company.No. 50. G. £10 10s.This is a subscription of five guineas for each year: this amount completes that sum (with the £15 15s.which appeared at p. 65, February Fors) for each of the five years.The publication of the following letter, with its answer, will, I hope, not cause Mr. Tarrant any further displeasure. I have only in the outset to correct his statement that the payment of £10 14s.11d.was onmybehalf. It is simply payment to another lawyer. And my first statement was absolutely accurate; I never said Mr. Tarrant had himself taxed, but that he had been “employed in taxing”; I do not concern myself with more careful analysis, when the accounts are all in print. My accusation is against the ‘legal profession generally,’ not against a firm which I have chosen as an entirely trustworthy one, to be employed both in St. George’s business and my own.2, Bond Court, Walbrook,25th April, 1876.Dear Mr. Ruskin,—I have the April ‘Fors,’ in which I see you have published our account of costs against you, amounting to £47 13s.4d.The document was yours, and you had a perfect right to lay it before your readers, but you are the first client who has ever thought it necessary to put such a document of mine to such a use. I don’t know, however, that it will do me any injury, although the statement preceding it is somewhat inaccurate,[190]because our costs of the transfer of the Sheffield property were £26 15s.11d., which included a payment of £10 14s.11d.made on your behalf, leaving our costs at £16 1s., the other portion of the £47 13s.4d.being costs relating to the constitution of the St. George’s Company, leaving altogether £29 14s.11d.only payable to us beyond money paid on your account. It is hardly fair, therefore, to say that Iemployed myselfin taxing the transfer of the property to nearly £50.As to the charge for letters (the writing of which is really not brickmakers’ work), you must bear in mind that the entire of your matters had to be done by correspondence, for which you are fairly chargeable; and I cannot accuse myself of having written a single letter that was unnecessary.As to the position of the St. George’s Company, it is not a legal company, if by that you mean a company recognized by law: it has neither the advantages nor disadvantages of companies incorporated in accordance with the provisions of the several Acts of Parliament relating to such matters. It is not a legal trust of a charitable nature, if by that term be meant a trust which is liable to the supervision or interference of the Charity Commissioners. It is a number of persons unincorporated, but associated for other purposes than that of gain. It is on a similar footing to such a society as that for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. The Master will be personally responsible for the debts of the Company contracted by his order. If you desire to have a legal-Company, or the supervision of the Charity Commissioners, you must give way in many points which you have hitherto considered indispensable to your scheme. On the 29th February last we sent you a specimen of the form in which we proposed to draw up the memorandum for each Companion to subscribe. If you will return us this with any remarks upon it which may occur to you, we will at once have it engrossed, and send it you to be signed by all the Companions.[191]We were expecting a call from you when you were in town some time since, and should have then have discussed this subject with you, and also the subject of the trust deed which will have to be executed by the Master of the Company.We will act upon your suggestion, and forward the deed of the Sheffield property to Mr. Bagshawe. Shall I also send all the title deeds to him relating to the property? Tell me this.Faithfully yours,W. P. Tarrant.Professor Ruskin,Arthur Severn, Esq., Herne Hill, S.E.(Answer.)Patterdale,6th May, 1876Dear Mr. Tarrant,—I was surprised and vexed by the opening of your letter of 25th April, showing that you had not in the least hitherto understood the scope or meaning of my present work. There is not the smallest unfriendliness in my publication of your account. No client ever had occasion to do it before, of course;—you never had a client before engaged in steady and lifelong contest with the existing principles of the Law, the Church, and the Army,—had you? The publication of your accounts of course can do you no harm, if they are fair; nor have, or had I, the slightest idea of their being otherwise. All accounts for St. George are to be printed: the senders-in must look to the consequences.The delay in my returning your draft of the rules of Company is because every lawyer I speak to tells me of a new difficulty. The whole piece of business, you remember, arose from my request to you simply to secure a piece of ground to our trustees, which had been given us by Mr. Baker. Now I find at the last moment that neither Mr. Baker nor anybody else cangiveus a piece of land at all, but must sell it us.Next, I want to know if this form, as you have drawn it up,[192]is approved by me, what are you going to do with it? What is the good of it? Will the writing of it in black letter make us a legal company, like a railway company, capable of holding land? Do the Charity Commissioners interfere withtheirbusiness? or must we blow some people to bits or smash them into jelly, to prove our want of charity,—and get leave, therefore, to do what we like with our own?Fix your minds, and Mr. Barber’s, on this one point—the grip of the land. If you can’t give us that, send us in your accounts, and let us be done with the matter. If you can, on the document as it stands, write it out on the rubbish your modern stationers call parchment, and do what you will with it, so.I am really ashamed to give any farther account, just now, of the delays in our land work, or of little crosses and worries blocking my first attempt at practice. One of the men whom I thought I had ready for this Worcestershire land, being ordered, for trial, to do a little bit of rough work in Yorkshire that I might not torment Mr. Baker with his freshmanship, threw up the task at once, writing me a long letter of which one sentence was enough for me,—that “he would dohis share, but no more.” These infernal notions of Equality and Independence are so rooted, now, even in the best men’s minds, that they don’t so much as know even what Obedience or Fellowship mean! Fancy one of Nelson’s or Lord Cochrane’s men retreating from his gun, with the avowed resolution to ‘do no more than his share’! However, I know there’s good in this man, and I doubt not he will repent, and break down no more; but I shall not try him again for a year. And I must be forgiven my St. George’s accounts this month. I really can’t let the orchises and hyacinths go out of flower while I’m trying to cast sums; and I’ve been two whole days at work on the[193]purple marsh orchis alone, which my botanical readers will please observe is in St. George’s schools to be called ‘Porphyria veris,’ ‘Spring Purplet.’ It is, I believe, Ophelia’s “long purple.” There are a quantity of new names to be invented for the whole tribe, their present ones being not by St. George endurable.The subjoined letter gives me great pleasure: it is from a son of my earliest Oxford friend: who, as his father helped me in educating myself, is now helping me in the education of others. I print it entire; it may give some of my readers an idea of the minor hindrances which meet one at every step, and take as much time to conquer as large ones. The work to be done is to place a series of the simple chemical elements as ‘Imps’ in a pretty row of poetical Bottles at Sheffield.“Broad Street, Oxford,March 30, 1876.“My dear Mr. Ruskin,—I knocked in vain at your ‘oak’ last night when I came to Corpus to report progress, and also to ask you two questions, which must be put to you by letter, as there is not much time to lose if you wish to have the alkaline earths ready by the time you go to Sheffield. Firstly, do you wish me to see about getting themetalsof the alkalies, and if so which of them do you want? Some of them are extremely expensive,—calcium, for instance, being 2d.a grain; but then, as it is very light a very small quantity would be required as a specimen. The other questions were about the amount of the oxides, and about the shape of the bottles to hold them. I have in your absence chosen some long sample bottles which are very beautiful of their kind, and even if they do not meet your approval they can easily be changed when you return to Oxford. I am progressing fairly well with the earths—Magnesia is ready; Alumina and Baryta partly made, but not yet pure, for it is not more easy in chemistry to get a perfect thing than in any other matter with which man has anything to do, and to-day I have been extremely unfortunate[194]with the Baryta, having tried two methods of making it, broken four crucibles, and, worst of all, failed to make it in a state of purity: however I shall have one more try to-morrow, and no doubt shall succeed. If there is any chance of your being in Oxford before Easter, I will not make the Silica, since the process is very beautiful, and one which no doubt you would like to see. Please excuse the length of my letter, and believe me,“Affectionately yours,“Theodore D. Acland.”II. Affairs of the Master.I am aghast at the columnar aspect of any account given in satisfactory detail; and will only gradually, as I have space, illustrate my own expenditure and its course. That unexplained hundred of last month, diminished itself, I find, thus:£s.d.Pocket1000Klein, (final account on dismissal to Rotterdam, paying his passage, and a shilling or two over)3000Downs, for my London quarterly pensioners2500Morley, (Oxford bookbinding)316Easter presents5007316Leaving a balance of26186to be added to the £200 of personal expenses in this month’s accounts. About a hundred and twenty of this has gone in a fortnight’s posting, with Mr. and Mrs. Severn, from London to Coniston, stopping to see St. Albans, Peterborough, Croyland, Stamford and Burleigh, Grantham, Newark, Lincoln, our new ground at Sheffield, Pomfret, Knaresborough, Ripon, Fountain’s, Richmond, Mortham Tower, and Brougham Castle. A pleasant life, you think? Yes,—if I led an unpleasant one, however dutiful, I could not write any of my books, least of all, Fors. But I am glad, if you honestly think it a pleasant life;why, if[195]so, my richer readers, do you drive only round the parks, every day, instead of from place to place through England, learning a thing or two on the road? Of the rest of the ‘self’ money, I leave further account till next month: it is not all gone yet. I give, however, for a typical example, one of Downs’s weekly bills, reaching the symmetrical total of £7 7s.7d., or a guinea and a penny a day, which I think is about the average. Of the persons named therein as receiving weekly wage, Hersey is our old under-gardener, now rheumatic, and as little able to earn his dinner as I am myself; Rusch, my old lapidary, who cuts in the course of the week what pebbles he can for me; Best, an old coachman, who used to come to us from livery-stable on occasion, and now can’t drive any more; Christy, an old woman who used to work for my mother.1876.£s.d.April22.Cash in hand3012829.Men’s Wages410Coachman’s Book11610Charities0160Sundries0139£777April29.Balance in hand£2351Men’s Wages.£s.d.April29.David Downs1150Thomas Hersey150John Rusch110£410Coachman’s Book.£s.d.April29.Plate Powder, 1s.; Oil, 10d.0110Soap and Sand010Wages1140£11610[196]Charities.£s.d.William Best0100Mrs. Christy060£0160Sundries.£s.d.April22.Postage00524.Rail and ’Bus, British Museum010Cord for Boxes, 1s.6d.; Postage, 1s.6½d.030½25.Horse and Cart, Boxes to Station076Carman, 1s.; Booking ditto, 6d.016Postage00126and 28. Postage002½£0139After thus much of miniature illustration, I have only to explain of the broad effects in the account below, that my Oxford secretary, who has £200 a year, does such work for me connected with my Professorship as only a trained scholar could do, leaving me free here to study hyacinths. I wish I could give him the Professorship itself, but must do as I am bid by Oxford. My younger secretary, who has £100 a year, is this year put into office, for St. George’s correspondence; and I must beg my good friends—now, I am thankful to say, gathering a little to St. George’s work,—not to think themselves slighted in being answered by his hand, for mine is weary.1876.£s.d.April16.Balance1511101May1.Half-year’s Stipend of Slade Professorship179001690101464110Balance, May 16th£1225191[197]April20and 30. Self2000020.Downs500022.Photographs (Leucothea and Lippi)165025.Tailor’s Account3360May 1.Oxford Secretary100001.Raffaelle for May and June150015.Burgess5000£464110III.“Hastings,May 15.“My dear Ruskin,—I enclose two extracts, cut from the same day’s paper, which contain so grimly humorous a parallel between the ways in which the ‘Protestant Church’ and ‘the world’ are engaged in ‘obliterating all traces of the Virgin Mary,’ that I thought you might possibly use them in ‘Fors’ or elsewhere.“Yours affectionately,“C. Patmore.”(The following are the two extracts. Before giving them, I must reply to my greatly honoured and loved friend, that both the Bristol destroyers of images and New York destroyers of humanity, are simply—Lost Sheep of the great Catholic Church; account of whom will be required atherhand.)“Iconoclasm at Bristol.—Our Bristol correspondent writes: The removal of the ‘imagery’ from the north porch of Bristol Cathedral has created considerable excitement in the city and in Clifton. As a member of the capitular body who is known to strongly object to the figures was seen near the Cathedral late on Wednesday night, the clerk of the works employed ‘watchers,’ his intention being to refuse admission to other than his own workmen. On Thursday morning he had occasion to leave the works to go to the quarries at Corsham, and while he was absent a gang of men, under the orders of the chapter clerk, entered the gates, and before the clerk of the works, who was telegraphed for, could[198]return, hauled down the four statues andobliterated all traces of the Virgin Mary, doing much damage to other carving in the process of removal. The last has by no means been heard of this affair. The statues cost over £100 each, but the money value of the ‘imagery’ is not considered by the Restoration Committee. Their contention is that, until the work was completed and handed over to the Cathedral body, it belonged to the Restoration Committee; and it is believed that the right of the Chapter to act as they have done will be tested in a court of law. Feeling is so strong against the action of the Dean and Chapter that plenty of money would be forthcoming to prosecute such an inquiry.”—Pall Mall Gazette, April 7, 1876.“One of the latest ‘sensations’ in New York has been a ‘female boxing match,’ aptly described by theNew York Timesas a ‘novel and nonsensical exhibition.’ The combatants—or ‘lady contestants,’ as they are called in the report of the proceedings—were two ballet-girls, of the kind known as ‘variety dancers.’ One, Miss Saunders, wore a white bodice, purple knee-breeches, which she had borrowed from an Ethiopian serenader, red stockings, and shoes. The other, Miss Harland, was attired in blue trunks and white tights. Both appeared nervous, were very pale, tried to blush, and ‘partially succeeded.’ When the fighting began, Miss Harland ‘did not know what to do with her hands.’ Miss Saunders, however, had her fists more at command, and, after some preliminary sparring, succeeded in striking her opponent ‘square in the face.’ Miss Harland, on her side, ‘by a vicious blow from the shoulder,’ managed to disarrange Miss Saunders’s back hair. Both ladies then smiled. In the end Miss Harland lost the match, ‘owing to her confirmed habit of swinging her hands around in the air.’ Miss Saunders was declared the winner, and carried off a prize of 200 dols. and a piece of silver plate; Miss Harland received[199]a ten-dollar bill from an amateur who thought she deserved consolation; and the two ‘lady contestants’ left the stage arm-in-arm.”—Pall Mall Gazette, April 7, 1876.IV. In last Fors, though I thought I knew my ‘Old Mortality’ well enough, I carelessly wrote ‘Elspeth,’ for ‘Elizabeth,’ (meaning Bessie Maclure); and the misprint ‘Arannah’ for ‘Araunah’ escaped my eyes three times over. The more grotesque one of ‘changes’ for ‘charges,’ in p. 168, line 25, was I suppose appointed by Fors to chastise me for incurable flirtation. I wish I knew who these two schoolgirls are, whom I’ve got to finish my letter to if I can, this time.My dears, will you please, for I can’t rewrite what I’ve said so often, read, when you have opportunity, the letter to a young lady in Fors 34, pp. 29, 30.6Respecting the third article in that letter, I have now a few words to add; (read also, if you can, what is said of the Word of God, in Letters 45 and 46). I told you in last Fors that you would have great difficulty in getting leave from English society to obey Christ. Fors has since sent me, in support of this statement, a paper called ‘The Christian,’—the number for Thursday, May 11,—in the fifteenth page of which is an article on young ladies headed “What can they do?” from which I take the following passage:—“There have been times of special prayer for young men and women. Could there not be also for the very large class of young ladies who do not go out into society? They have no home duties to detain them, as many in a humbler condition; they have hours and hours of leisure, and know not how to spend them—partly from need of being directed, but more so from the prejudices[200]and hindrances in their way. Their hearts are burning to do something for Christ, but they are not allowed, partly because it is considered ‘improper,’ and for a variety of reasons.“There is a cry on every side for labourers. There are numbers longing to respond; if not wholly to dedicate their lives, at least a portion of their days, to active Christian service, and only a wave of united prayer can throw these objections aside, and free the large band who are so willing.“A bright young Christian came to me this week. She is tired of meetings to which she is constantly taken, but never allowed to work in the inquiry-room at them,—hindered from taking up the least bit of work, till at last she cannot evenaskfor it. Almost to ‘kill time,’ she has taken up a secular corresponding agency.”Now that it is ‘considered improper’ by the world that you should do anything for Christ, is entirely true, and always true; and therefore it was that your Godfathers and Godmothers, in your name, renounced the “vain pomp and glory of the world,” with all covetous desires of the same—see baptismal service—(I wonder if you had pretty names—won’t you tell me?) but I much doubt if you, either privately or from the pulpit of your doubtless charming church, have ever been taught what the “vain pomp and glory of the world” was.Well, do you want to be better dressed than your schoolfellows? Some of them are probably poor, and cannot afford to dress like you; or, on the other hand, you may be poor yourselves, and may be mortified at their being dressed better than you. Putanend to all that at once, by resolving to go down into the deep of your girl’s heart, where you will find, inlaid by Christ’s own hand, a better thing than vanity; pity. And be sure of this, that, although in a truly Christian land, every young girl would be dressed beautifully and delightfully,—in this entirely heathen and Baal-worshipping land of ours, not one girl in ten has either decent or healthy clothing, and that you have no[201]business now to wear anything fine yourself, but are bound to use your full strength and resources to dress as many of your poor neighbours as you can. What of fine dress your people insist upon your wearing, take—and wear proudly and prettily, for their sakes; but, so far as in you lies, be sure that every day you are labouring to clothe some poorer creatures. And if you cannot clothe, at least help, with your hands. You can make your own bed; wash your own plate; brighten your own furniture,—if nothing else.‘But that’s servant’s work’? Of course it is. What business have you to hope to be better than a servant of servants? ‘God made you a lady’? Yes, he has put you, that is to say, in a position in which you may learn to speak your own language beautifully; to be accurately acquainted with the elements of other languages; to behave with grace, tact, and sympathy to all around you; to know the history of your country, the commands of its religion, and the duties of its race. If you obey His will in learning these things, you will obtain the power of becoming a true ‘lady;’ and you will become one, if while you learn these things you set yourself, with all the strength of your youth and womanhood, to serve His servants, until the day come when He calls you to say, “Well done, good and faithful servant: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”You may thus become a Christ’s lady, or you may, if you will, become a Belial’s lady, taking Belial’s gift of miserable idleness, living on the labour and shame of others, anddeceivingthem and yourself by lies about Providence, until you perish in hell with the rest of such, shrieking the bitter cry, “When saw weThee?”V.“3, Athole Crescent, Perth,10th May, 1876.“Sir,—Thinking that it may interest you, I take the liberty of writing to let you know that the ‘Lead’ is not at all in the state[202]you suppose it to be; but still runs down, very clear, by the side of the North Inch and past Rose Terrace, and, judging from the numbers of them at this moment playing by it, affords no small delight to the children.“I am, yours most respectfully,“A Reader of ‘Fors.’”VI.“Easthampstead Rectory, Bracknell,“April 20, 1876.“My dear Ruskin,—I have just received this month’s ‘Fors,’ but not read it, (of course not; my friends never do, except to find the mistakes,) as I am off to Dublin, but as regards Psalm lxxxvii., (note, p. 110,) I expounded it in a sermon some time since, and was talking of it to a very learned Hebraist last Monday. Rahab, there, is generally understood to mean ‘the monster,’ and has nothing to do, beyond resemblance of sound, with Rahab the harlot. And the monster is the crocodile, as typical of Egypt. In Psalm lxxxix. 10, (the Bible version, not the Prayer Book,) you will see Rahab explained in the margin, by ‘or Egypt.’“Perhaps Rahab the harlot was called by the same name from the rapacity of her class, just as in Latinlupa.“The whole Psalm is badly translated, and, as we have it, unintelligible. But it is really charged with deep prophetical meaning. I cannot write more, so believe me,“Ever yours affectionately,“O. Gordon.“I hope you will have had a pleasant journey when you receive this. The Greek Septuagint is much better than the English, but not good. As regards the general meaning, you have divined it very correctly.”[203]1‘Early History of Mankind,’ (a book of rare value and research, however,) p. 379.↑2In the meantime, if any of my readers will look at the leading articles of the ‘Monetary Gazette,’ whose editor I thank with all my heart and soul, for the first honest commercial statements I ever saw in English journals, they will get sufficient light on such matters.↑3Corr., Art. VI.↑4See, on that subject, the third number of Deucalion.↑5Article III. of Correspondence.↑6I should like my lady readers in general to have, of back Fors numbers, at least, 30, 34, 36, 45, 46, and 48: those who have the complete book should scratch out the eleventh line in p. 18 of the last Index, and put the 10th line of it thus: “Ladies, and girls, advice to,30, 2;34, 29;45, 212;48, 271.”↑

LETTER LXVI.

Brantwood,14th May, 1876.Those of my readers who have followed me as far as I have hitherto gone in our careful reading of the Pentateuch, must, I think, have felt with me, in natural consequence of this careful reading, more than hitherto, the life and reality of the record; but, in the degree of this new life, new wonderfulness, and difficult credibility! For it is always easy to imagine that we believe what we do not understand; and often graceful and convenient to consent in the belief of others, as to what we do not care about. But when we begin to know clearly what is told, the question if it be fable or fact becomes inevitable in our minds; and if the fact, once admitted, would bear upon our conduct, its admission can no longer be made a matter of mere social courtesy.Accordingly, I find one of my more earnest readers[172]already asking me, privately, if I really believed that the hail on Good Friday last had been sent as a punishment for national sin?—and I should think, and even hope, that other of my readers would like to ask me, respecting the same passage, whether I believed that the sun ever stood still?To whom I could only answer, what I answered some time since in my paper on Miracle for the Metaphysical Society, (‘Contemporary Review’) that the true miracle, to my mind, would not be in the sun’s standing still, but IS in its going on! We are all of us being swept down to death in a sea of miracle; we are drowned in wonder, as gnats in a Rhine whirlpool: unless we are worse,—drowned in pleasure, or sloth, or insolence.Nevertheless, I do not feel myself in the least called upon to believe that the sun stood still, or the earth either, during that pursuit at Ajalon. Nay, it would not anywise amaze me to find that there never had been any such pursuit—never any Joshua, never any Moses; and that the Jews, “taken generally,” as an amiable clerical friend told me from his pulpit a Sunday or two ago, “were a Christian people.”But it does amaze me—almost to helplessness of hand and thought—to find the men and women of these days careless of such issue; and content, so that they can feed and breathe their fill, to eat like cattle, and breathe like plants, questionless of the Spirit that makes the grass to grow for them on the mountains, or the[173]breeze they breathe on them, its messengers, or the fire that dresses their food, its minister. Desolate souls, for whom the sun—beneath, not above, the horizon—stands still for ever.‘Amazed,’ I say, ‘almost to helplessness of hand and thought’—quite literally of both. I was reading yesterday, by Fors’ order, Mr. Edward B. Tylor’s idea of the Greek faith in Apollo: “If the sun travels along its course like a glittering chariot, forthwith the wheels, and the driver, and the horses are there;”1and Mr. Frederick Harrison’s gushing article on Humanity, in the ‘Contemporary Review’; and a letter about our Cotton Industry, (hereafter to be quoted,2) and this presently following bit of Sir Philip Sidney’s 68th Psalm;—and my hands are cold this morning, after the horror, and wonder, and puzzlement of my total Sun-less-day, and my head is now standing still, or at least turning round, giddy, instead of doing its work by Shrewsbury clock; and I don’t know where to begin with the quantity I want to say,—all the less that I’ve said a great deal of it before, if I only knew where to tell you to find it. All up and down my later books, from ‘Unto This Last’ to ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ and again and again throughout ‘Fors,’[174]you will find references to the practical connection between physical and spiritual light—of which now I would fain state, in the most unmistakable terms, this sum: that you cannot love the real sun, that is to say physical light and colour, rightly, unless you love the spiritual sun, that is to say justice and truth, rightly. That for unjust and untrue persons, there is no real joy in physical light, so that they don’t even know what the word means. That the entire system of modern life is so corrupted with the ghastliest forms of injustice and untruth, carried to the point of not recognising themselves as either—for as long as Bill Sykes knows that he is a robber, and Jeremy Diddler that he is a rascal, there is still some of Heaven’s light left for both—but when everybody steals, cheats, and goes to church, complacently, and the light of their whole body is darkness, how great is that darkness! And that the physical result of that mental vileness is a total carelessness of the beauty of sky, or the cleanness of streams, or the life of animals and flowers: and I believe that the powers of Nature are depressed or perverted, together with the Spirit of Man; and therefore that conditions of storm and of physical darkness, such as never were before in Christian times, are developing themselves, in connection also with forms of loathsome insanity, multiplying through the whole genesis of modern brains.As I correct this sheet for press, I chance, by Fors’[175]order, in a prayer of St. John Damascene’s to the Virgin, on this, to me, very curious and interesting clause: “Redeem me from the dark metamorphosis of the angels, rescuing me from the bitter law-giving of the farmers of the air, and the rulers of the darkness.”“τῆς σκοτεινῆς με τῶν διαμόνων λυτρου μέτημορφῆς, (I am not answerable either for Damascene Greek, or for my MS. of it, in 1396,)τοῦ πικροτάτου λογοθεσίου τῶν τελωνῶν τοῦ ἀέρος καὶ τῶν ἀρχόντων τοῦ σκότους ἐξαίρουσα.”And now—of this entangling in the shrine of half born and half-sighted things, see this piece of Sir Philip Sidney’s psalm. I want it also for the bit of conchology at the end. The italics are mine.“And call ye this to utter what is just,You that of justice hold the sov’raign throne?And call yee this to yield, O sonnes of dust,To wronged brethren ev’ry one his own?O no: it is your long malicious willNow to the world to make by practice known,With whose oppression you the ballance fill,Just to your selves, indiff’rent else to none.But what could they, who ev’n in birth declin’d,From truth and right to lies and injuries?To shew thevenom of their cancred myndThe adder’s image scarcely can suffice.[176]Nay, scarce the aspick may with them contend,On whom the charmer all in vaine appliesHis skillful’st spells: aye, missing of his end,While sheeself-deaf, and unaffectedlies.Lord, crack their teeth, Lord, crush Thou these lions’ jawes,Soe lett them sinck as water in the sand:When deadly bow their aiming fury drawes,Shiver the shaft, ere past the shooter’s hand.So make them melt as the dishowsed snaile,Or as the embrio, whose vitall bandBreakes ere it holdes, and formlesse eyes doe faileTo see the sun, though brought to lightfull land.”‘Dishoused’ snail! That’s a bit, observe, of Sir Philip’s own natural history, perfecting the image in the psalm, “as a snail which melteth.” The ‘housed’ snail can shelter himself from evil weather, but the poor houseless slug, a mere slimy mass of helpless blackness,—shower-begotten, as it seems,—what is to become ofitwhen the sun is up!Not that even houseless snails melt,—nor that there’s anything about snails at all in David’s psalm, I believe, both Vulgate and LXX. saying ‘wax’ instead, as in Psalms lxviii. 2, xcvii. 5, etc.; but I suppose there’s some reptilian sense in the Hebrew, justifying our translation here—all the more interesting to me[177]because of a puzzle I got into in Isaiah, the other day; respecting which, lest you should fancy I’m too ready to give up Joshua and the sun without taking trouble about them, please observe this very certain condition of your Scriptural studies: that if you read the Bible with predetermination to pick out every text you approve of—that is to say, generally, any that confirm you in the conceit of your own religious sect,—that console you for the consequences of your own faults,—or assure you of a pleasant future though you attend to none of your present duties—on these terms you will find the Bible entirely intelligible, and wholly delightful: but if you read it with a real purpose of trying to understand it, and obey; and so read it all through, steadily, you will find it, out and out, the crabbedest and most difficult book you ever tried; horribly ill written in many parts, according to all human canons; totally unintelligible in others; and with the gold of it only to be got at by a process of crushing in which nothing but the iron teeth of the fiercest and honestest resolution will prevail against its adamant.For instance, take the 16th of Isaiah. Who is to send the Lamb? why is the Lamb to be sent? what does the Lamb mean? There is nothing in the Greek Bible about a Lamb at all, nor is anybody told to send anything. But God saysHewill send something, apostolically, as reptiles!Then, are the daughters of Moab the outcasts, as[178]in the second verse, or other people, as in the fourth? How is Moab’s throne to be established in righteousness, in the tabernacle of David, in the fifth? What are his lies not to be, in the sixth? And why is he to howl for himself, in the seventh? Ask any of the young jackanapes you put up to chatter out of your pulpits, to tell you even so much as this, of the first half-dozen verses! But above all, ask them who the persons are who are to be sent apostolically as reptiles?Meanwhile, on the way to answer, I’ve got a letter,3not from a jackanapes, but a thoroughly learned and modest clergyman, and old friend, advising me of my mistake in April Fors, in supposing that Rahab, in the 89th Psalm, means the harlot. It is, he tells me, a Hebrew word for the Dragon adversary, as in the verse “He hath cut Rahab, and wounded the Dragon.” That will come all the clearer and prettier for us, when we have worked it out, with Rahab herself and all; meantime, please observe what a busy creature she must have been—the stalks of her flax in heaps enough to hide the messengers! doubtless also, she was able to dye her thread of the brightest scarlet, a becoming colour.4Well, I can’t get that paper of Mr. Frederick Harrison’s out of my head; chiefly because I know and like its writer; and Idon’tlike his wasting his time in writing[179]that sort of stuff. What I have got to say to him, anent it, may better be said publicly, because I must write it carefully, and with some fulness; and if he won’t attend to me, perhaps some of his readers may. So I consider him, for the time, as one of my acquaintances among working men, and dedicate the close of this letter to him specially.My dear Harrison,—I am very glad you have been enjoying yourself at Oxford; and that you still think it a pretty place. But why, in the name of all that’s developing, did you walk in those wretched old Magdalen walks? They’re as dull as they were thirty years ago. Why didn’t you promenade in our new street, opposite Mr. Ryman’s? or under the rapturous sanctities of Keble? or beneath the lively new zigzag parapet of Tom Quad?—or, finally, in the name of all that’s human and progressive, why not up and down the elongating suburb of the married Fellows, on the cock-horse road to Banbury?However, I’m glad you’ve been at the old place; even though you wasted the bloom of your holiday-spirits in casting your eyes, in that too childish and pastoral manner, “round this sweet landscape, with its myriad blossoms and foliage, its meadows in their golden glory,” etc.; and declaring that all you want other people to do is to “follow out in its concrete results this sense of collective evolution.” Will you only be patient enough, for the help of this old head of mine[180]on stooping shoulders, to tell me one or two of the inconcrete results of separate evolution?Had you done me the honour to walk through my beautifully developing schools, you would have found, just outside of them, (turned out because I’m tired of seeing it, and want something progressive) the cast of the Elgin Theseus. I am tired thereof, it is true; but I don’t yet see my way, as a Professor of Modern Art, to the superseding it. On the whole, it appears to me a very satisfactory type of the human form; arrived at, as you know, two thousand and two hundred years ago. And you tell me, nevertheless, to “see how this transcendent power of collective evolution holdsmein the hollow of its hand!” Well, I hope Iamhandsomer than the Theseus; it’s very pleasant to think so, but it did not strike me before. May I flatter myself it is really your candid opinion? Will you just look at the “Realization of the (your?) Ideal,” in the number of ‘Vanity Fair’ for February 17th, 1872, and confirm me on this point?Granting whatever advance in the ideal of humanity you thus conclude, I still am doubtful of your next reflection. “But these flowers and plants which we can see between the cloisters, and trellised round the grey traceries—” (My dear boy, what haveyouto do with cloisters or traceries? Leave that business to the jackdaws; their loquacious and undeveloped praise is enough for such relics of the barbarous past. You don’t want[181]to shut yourself up, do you? and you couldn’t design a tracery, for your life; and you don’t know a good one from a bad one: what in the name of common sense or common modesty do you mean by chattering about these?) “What races of men in China, Japan, India, Mexico, South America, Australasia, first developed their glory out of some wild bloom?” Frankly, I don’t know—being in this no wiser than you; but also I don’t care: and in this carelessnessamwiser than you, because Idoknow this—that if you will look into the Etruscan room of the British Museum, you will find there an Etruscan Demeter of—any time you please—B.C., riding on a car whose wheels are of wild roses: that the wild rose ofhertime is thus proved to be precisely the wild rose ofmytime, growing behind my study on the hillside; and for my own part, I would not give a spray of it for all Australasia, South America, and Japan together. Perhaps, indeed, apples have improved since the Hesperides’ time; but I know they haven’t improved since I was a boy, and I can’t get a Ribston Pippin, now, for love or money.Of Pippins in Devonshire, of cheese in Cheshire, believe me, my good friend,—though I trust much more than you in the glorified future of both,—you will find no development in the present scientific day;—of Asphodel none; of Apples none demonstrable; but of Eves? From the ductile and silent gold of ancient womanhood to the resonant bronze, and tinkling—not cymbal, but[182]shall we say—saucepan, of Miss Frances Power Cobbe, thereisan interval, with a vengeance; widening to the future. You yourself, I perceive, have no clear insight into this solidified dispersion of the lingering pillar of Salt, whichhadbeen good for hospitality in its day; and which yet would have some honour in its descendant, the poor gleaning Moabitess, into your modern windily progressive pillar of Sand, with “career open to it” indeed other than that of wife and mother—good for nothing, at last, but burial heaps. But are you indeed so proud of what has been already achieved? I will take you on your own terms, and study only the evolution of the Amazonian Virgin. Take first the ancient type of her, leading the lucent Cobbes of her day, ‘florentes aere catervas.’“Bellatrix. Non illa colo, calathisve MinervaeFoemineas assueta manus.Illam omnis tectis agrisqu’ effusa juventusTurbaque miratur matrum; et prospectat euntem.Attonitis inhians animis: ut regius ostroVelet honos leves humeros; ut fibula crinemAuro internectat; Lyciam ut gerat ipsa pharetramEt pastoralem praefixa cuspide myrtum.”With this picture, will you compare that so opportunely furnished me by the author of the ‘Angel in the House,’5of the modern Camilla, in “white[183]bodice, purple knee-breeches, which she had borrowed from an Ethiopian serenader, red stockings, and shoes.” From this sphere of Ethiopian aspiration, may not even the divinely emancipated spirit of Cobbe cast one glance—“Backward, Ho”?But suppose I grant your Evolution of the Japanese Rose, and the Virginian Virago, how of other creatures? of other things? I don’t find the advocates of Evolution much given to studying either men, women, or roses; I perceive them to be mostly occupied with frogs and lice. Is there a Worshipful Batrachianity—a Divine Pedicularity?—Stay, I see at page 874 that Pantheism is “muddled sentiment”; but it was you, my dear boy, who began the muddling with your Japanese horticulture.YourHumanity has no more to do with roses than with Rose-chafers or other vermin; but I must really beg you not to muddle your terms as well as your head. “We, whohavethought and studied,” do not admit that “humanity is an aggregate of men.” An aggregate of men is a mob, and not ‘Humanity’; and an aggregate of sheep is a flock, and not Ovility; and an aggregate of geese is——perhaps you had better consult Mr. Herbert Spencer and the late Mr. John Stuart Mill for the best modern expression,—but if you want to know the proper names for aggregates, in good old English, go and read Lady Juliana’s list in the book of St. Albans.I do not care, however, to pursue questions with you[184]of these ‘concrete developments.’ For, frankly, I conceive myself to know considerably more than you do, of organic Nature and her processes, and of organic English and its processes; but there is one development of which, since it is your special business to know it, and I suppose your pleasure, I hope you know much more than I do, (whose business I find by no means forwarded by it, still less my pleasure)—the Development of Law. For the concrete development of beautifully bewigged humanity, called a lawyer, I beg you to observe that I always express, and feel, extreme respect. But for Law itself, in the existent form of it, invented, as it appears to me, only for the torment and taxation of Humanity, I entertain none whatsoever. I may be wrong, and I don’t want to be wrong; and you, who know the law, can show me if I am wrong or not. Here, then, are four questions of quite vital importance to Humanity, which if you will answer to me positively, you will do more good than I have yet known done by Positivism.1. What is ‘Usury’ as defined by existing Law?2. Is Usury, as defined by existing law, an absolute term, such as Theft, or Adultery? and is a man therefore a Usurer who only commits Usury a little, as a man is an Adulterer who only commits Adultery a little?3. Or is it a sin incapable of strict definition, or strictly retributive punishment; like ‘Cruelty’? and is a man criminal in proportion to the quantity of it he commits?[185]4. If criminal in proportion to the quantity he commits, is the proper legal punishment in the direct ratio of the quantity, or inverse ratio of the quantity, as it is in the case of theft?If you will answer these questions clearly, you will do more service to Humanity than by writing any quantity of papers either on its Collective Development or its Abstract being. I have not touched upon any of the more grave questions glanced at in your paper, because in your present Mercutial temper I cannot expect you to take cognizance of anything grave. With respect to such matters, I will “ask for you to-morrow,” not to-day. But here—to end my Fors with a piece of pure English,—are two little verses of Sir Philip’s, merry enough, in measure, to be set to a Fandango if you like. I may, perhaps, some time or other, ask you if you can apply them personally, in address to Mr. Comte. For the nonce I only ask you the above four plain questions of English law; and I adjure you, by the soul of every Comes reckoned up in unique Comte—by all that’s positive, all that’s progressive, all that’s spiral, all that’s conchoidal, and all that’s evolute—great Human Son of Holothurian Harries, answer me.“Since imprisoned in my motherThou me feed’st, whom have I otherHeld my stay, or made my song?[186]Yea, when all me so misdeemed,I to most a monster seemedYet in thee my hope was strong.Yet of thee the thankful storyFilled my mouth: thy gratious gloryWas my ditty all the day.Do not then, now age assaileth,Courage, verdure, vertue faileth,Do not leave me cast away.”I have little space, as now too often, for any definite school work. My writing-lesson, this month, is a facsimile of the last words written by Nelson; in his cabin, with the allied fleets in sight, off Trafalgar. It is entirely fine in general structure and character.Mr. Ward has now three, and will I hope soon have the fourth, of our series of lesson photographs, namely,—1.Madonna by Filippo Lippi.2.The Etruscan Leucothea.3.Madonna by Titian.4.Infanta Margaret, by Velasquez.On these I shall lecture, as I have time, here and in the ‘Laws of Fésole;’ but, in preparation for all farther study, when you have got the four, put them beside each other, putting the Leucothea first, the Lippi second, and the others as numbered.[187]Then, the first, the Leucothea, is entirely noble religious art, of the fifth or sixth centuryB.C., full of various meaning and mystery, of knowledges that are lost, feelings that have ceased, myths and symbols of the laws of life, only to be traced by those who know much both of life and death.Technically, it is still in Egyptian bondage, but in course of swiftly progressive redemption.The second is nobly religious work of the fifteenth century of Christ,—an example of the most perfect unison of religious myth with faithful realism of human nature yet produced in this world. The Etruscan traditions are preserved in it even to the tassels of the throne cushion: the pattern of these, and of the folds at the edge of the angel’s drapery, may be seen in the Etruscan tomb now central in the first compartment of the Egyptian gallery of the British Museum and the double cushion of that tomb is used, with absolute obedience to his tradition, by Jacopo della Quercia, in the tomb of Ilaria di Caretto.The third represents the last phase of the noble religious art of the world, in which realization has become consummate; but all supernatural aspect is refused, and mythic teaching is given only in obedience to former tradition, but with no anxiety for its acceptance. Here is, for certain, a sweet Venetian peasant, with her child, and fruit from the market-boats of Mestre. The Ecce Agnus, topsy-turvy on the[188]finely perspectived scroll, may be deciphered by whoso list.But the work itself is still sternly conscientious, severe, reverent, and faultless.The fourth is an example of the highest reach of technical perfection yet reached in art; all effort and labour seeming to cease in the radiant peace and simplicity of consummated human power. But all belief in supernatural things, all hope of a future state, all effort to teach, and all desire to be taught have passed away from the artist’s mind. The Child and her Dog are to him equally real, equally royal, equally mortal. And the History of Art since it reached this phase—cannot be given in the present number of ‘Fors Clavigera.’[189]NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.I. Affairs of the Company.No. 50. G. £10 10s.This is a subscription of five guineas for each year: this amount completes that sum (with the £15 15s.which appeared at p. 65, February Fors) for each of the five years.The publication of the following letter, with its answer, will, I hope, not cause Mr. Tarrant any further displeasure. I have only in the outset to correct his statement that the payment of £10 14s.11d.was onmybehalf. It is simply payment to another lawyer. And my first statement was absolutely accurate; I never said Mr. Tarrant had himself taxed, but that he had been “employed in taxing”; I do not concern myself with more careful analysis, when the accounts are all in print. My accusation is against the ‘legal profession generally,’ not against a firm which I have chosen as an entirely trustworthy one, to be employed both in St. George’s business and my own.2, Bond Court, Walbrook,25th April, 1876.Dear Mr. Ruskin,—I have the April ‘Fors,’ in which I see you have published our account of costs against you, amounting to £47 13s.4d.The document was yours, and you had a perfect right to lay it before your readers, but you are the first client who has ever thought it necessary to put such a document of mine to such a use. I don’t know, however, that it will do me any injury, although the statement preceding it is somewhat inaccurate,[190]because our costs of the transfer of the Sheffield property were £26 15s.11d., which included a payment of £10 14s.11d.made on your behalf, leaving our costs at £16 1s., the other portion of the £47 13s.4d.being costs relating to the constitution of the St. George’s Company, leaving altogether £29 14s.11d.only payable to us beyond money paid on your account. It is hardly fair, therefore, to say that Iemployed myselfin taxing the transfer of the property to nearly £50.As to the charge for letters (the writing of which is really not brickmakers’ work), you must bear in mind that the entire of your matters had to be done by correspondence, for which you are fairly chargeable; and I cannot accuse myself of having written a single letter that was unnecessary.As to the position of the St. George’s Company, it is not a legal company, if by that you mean a company recognized by law: it has neither the advantages nor disadvantages of companies incorporated in accordance with the provisions of the several Acts of Parliament relating to such matters. It is not a legal trust of a charitable nature, if by that term be meant a trust which is liable to the supervision or interference of the Charity Commissioners. It is a number of persons unincorporated, but associated for other purposes than that of gain. It is on a similar footing to such a society as that for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. The Master will be personally responsible for the debts of the Company contracted by his order. If you desire to have a legal-Company, or the supervision of the Charity Commissioners, you must give way in many points which you have hitherto considered indispensable to your scheme. On the 29th February last we sent you a specimen of the form in which we proposed to draw up the memorandum for each Companion to subscribe. If you will return us this with any remarks upon it which may occur to you, we will at once have it engrossed, and send it you to be signed by all the Companions.[191]We were expecting a call from you when you were in town some time since, and should have then have discussed this subject with you, and also the subject of the trust deed which will have to be executed by the Master of the Company.We will act upon your suggestion, and forward the deed of the Sheffield property to Mr. Bagshawe. Shall I also send all the title deeds to him relating to the property? Tell me this.Faithfully yours,W. P. Tarrant.Professor Ruskin,Arthur Severn, Esq., Herne Hill, S.E.(Answer.)Patterdale,6th May, 1876Dear Mr. Tarrant,—I was surprised and vexed by the opening of your letter of 25th April, showing that you had not in the least hitherto understood the scope or meaning of my present work. There is not the smallest unfriendliness in my publication of your account. No client ever had occasion to do it before, of course;—you never had a client before engaged in steady and lifelong contest with the existing principles of the Law, the Church, and the Army,—had you? The publication of your accounts of course can do you no harm, if they are fair; nor have, or had I, the slightest idea of their being otherwise. All accounts for St. George are to be printed: the senders-in must look to the consequences.The delay in my returning your draft of the rules of Company is because every lawyer I speak to tells me of a new difficulty. The whole piece of business, you remember, arose from my request to you simply to secure a piece of ground to our trustees, which had been given us by Mr. Baker. Now I find at the last moment that neither Mr. Baker nor anybody else cangiveus a piece of land at all, but must sell it us.Next, I want to know if this form, as you have drawn it up,[192]is approved by me, what are you going to do with it? What is the good of it? Will the writing of it in black letter make us a legal company, like a railway company, capable of holding land? Do the Charity Commissioners interfere withtheirbusiness? or must we blow some people to bits or smash them into jelly, to prove our want of charity,—and get leave, therefore, to do what we like with our own?Fix your minds, and Mr. Barber’s, on this one point—the grip of the land. If you can’t give us that, send us in your accounts, and let us be done with the matter. If you can, on the document as it stands, write it out on the rubbish your modern stationers call parchment, and do what you will with it, so.I am really ashamed to give any farther account, just now, of the delays in our land work, or of little crosses and worries blocking my first attempt at practice. One of the men whom I thought I had ready for this Worcestershire land, being ordered, for trial, to do a little bit of rough work in Yorkshire that I might not torment Mr. Baker with his freshmanship, threw up the task at once, writing me a long letter of which one sentence was enough for me,—that “he would dohis share, but no more.” These infernal notions of Equality and Independence are so rooted, now, even in the best men’s minds, that they don’t so much as know even what Obedience or Fellowship mean! Fancy one of Nelson’s or Lord Cochrane’s men retreating from his gun, with the avowed resolution to ‘do no more than his share’! However, I know there’s good in this man, and I doubt not he will repent, and break down no more; but I shall not try him again for a year. And I must be forgiven my St. George’s accounts this month. I really can’t let the orchises and hyacinths go out of flower while I’m trying to cast sums; and I’ve been two whole days at work on the[193]purple marsh orchis alone, which my botanical readers will please observe is in St. George’s schools to be called ‘Porphyria veris,’ ‘Spring Purplet.’ It is, I believe, Ophelia’s “long purple.” There are a quantity of new names to be invented for the whole tribe, their present ones being not by St. George endurable.The subjoined letter gives me great pleasure: it is from a son of my earliest Oxford friend: who, as his father helped me in educating myself, is now helping me in the education of others. I print it entire; it may give some of my readers an idea of the minor hindrances which meet one at every step, and take as much time to conquer as large ones. The work to be done is to place a series of the simple chemical elements as ‘Imps’ in a pretty row of poetical Bottles at Sheffield.“Broad Street, Oxford,March 30, 1876.“My dear Mr. Ruskin,—I knocked in vain at your ‘oak’ last night when I came to Corpus to report progress, and also to ask you two questions, which must be put to you by letter, as there is not much time to lose if you wish to have the alkaline earths ready by the time you go to Sheffield. Firstly, do you wish me to see about getting themetalsof the alkalies, and if so which of them do you want? Some of them are extremely expensive,—calcium, for instance, being 2d.a grain; but then, as it is very light a very small quantity would be required as a specimen. The other questions were about the amount of the oxides, and about the shape of the bottles to hold them. I have in your absence chosen some long sample bottles which are very beautiful of their kind, and even if they do not meet your approval they can easily be changed when you return to Oxford. I am progressing fairly well with the earths—Magnesia is ready; Alumina and Baryta partly made, but not yet pure, for it is not more easy in chemistry to get a perfect thing than in any other matter with which man has anything to do, and to-day I have been extremely unfortunate[194]with the Baryta, having tried two methods of making it, broken four crucibles, and, worst of all, failed to make it in a state of purity: however I shall have one more try to-morrow, and no doubt shall succeed. If there is any chance of your being in Oxford before Easter, I will not make the Silica, since the process is very beautiful, and one which no doubt you would like to see. Please excuse the length of my letter, and believe me,“Affectionately yours,“Theodore D. Acland.”II. Affairs of the Master.I am aghast at the columnar aspect of any account given in satisfactory detail; and will only gradually, as I have space, illustrate my own expenditure and its course. That unexplained hundred of last month, diminished itself, I find, thus:£s.d.Pocket1000Klein, (final account on dismissal to Rotterdam, paying his passage, and a shilling or two over)3000Downs, for my London quarterly pensioners2500Morley, (Oxford bookbinding)316Easter presents5007316Leaving a balance of26186to be added to the £200 of personal expenses in this month’s accounts. About a hundred and twenty of this has gone in a fortnight’s posting, with Mr. and Mrs. Severn, from London to Coniston, stopping to see St. Albans, Peterborough, Croyland, Stamford and Burleigh, Grantham, Newark, Lincoln, our new ground at Sheffield, Pomfret, Knaresborough, Ripon, Fountain’s, Richmond, Mortham Tower, and Brougham Castle. A pleasant life, you think? Yes,—if I led an unpleasant one, however dutiful, I could not write any of my books, least of all, Fors. But I am glad, if you honestly think it a pleasant life;why, if[195]so, my richer readers, do you drive only round the parks, every day, instead of from place to place through England, learning a thing or two on the road? Of the rest of the ‘self’ money, I leave further account till next month: it is not all gone yet. I give, however, for a typical example, one of Downs’s weekly bills, reaching the symmetrical total of £7 7s.7d., or a guinea and a penny a day, which I think is about the average. Of the persons named therein as receiving weekly wage, Hersey is our old under-gardener, now rheumatic, and as little able to earn his dinner as I am myself; Rusch, my old lapidary, who cuts in the course of the week what pebbles he can for me; Best, an old coachman, who used to come to us from livery-stable on occasion, and now can’t drive any more; Christy, an old woman who used to work for my mother.1876.£s.d.April22.Cash in hand3012829.Men’s Wages410Coachman’s Book11610Charities0160Sundries0139£777April29.Balance in hand£2351Men’s Wages.£s.d.April29.David Downs1150Thomas Hersey150John Rusch110£410Coachman’s Book.£s.d.April29.Plate Powder, 1s.; Oil, 10d.0110Soap and Sand010Wages1140£11610[196]Charities.£s.d.William Best0100Mrs. Christy060£0160Sundries.£s.d.April22.Postage00524.Rail and ’Bus, British Museum010Cord for Boxes, 1s.6d.; Postage, 1s.6½d.030½25.Horse and Cart, Boxes to Station076Carman, 1s.; Booking ditto, 6d.016Postage00126and 28. Postage002½£0139After thus much of miniature illustration, I have only to explain of the broad effects in the account below, that my Oxford secretary, who has £200 a year, does such work for me connected with my Professorship as only a trained scholar could do, leaving me free here to study hyacinths. I wish I could give him the Professorship itself, but must do as I am bid by Oxford. My younger secretary, who has £100 a year, is this year put into office, for St. George’s correspondence; and I must beg my good friends—now, I am thankful to say, gathering a little to St. George’s work,—not to think themselves slighted in being answered by his hand, for mine is weary.1876.£s.d.April16.Balance1511101May1.Half-year’s Stipend of Slade Professorship179001690101464110Balance, May 16th£1225191[197]April20and 30. Self2000020.Downs500022.Photographs (Leucothea and Lippi)165025.Tailor’s Account3360May 1.Oxford Secretary100001.Raffaelle for May and June150015.Burgess5000£464110III.“Hastings,May 15.“My dear Ruskin,—I enclose two extracts, cut from the same day’s paper, which contain so grimly humorous a parallel between the ways in which the ‘Protestant Church’ and ‘the world’ are engaged in ‘obliterating all traces of the Virgin Mary,’ that I thought you might possibly use them in ‘Fors’ or elsewhere.“Yours affectionately,“C. Patmore.”(The following are the two extracts. Before giving them, I must reply to my greatly honoured and loved friend, that both the Bristol destroyers of images and New York destroyers of humanity, are simply—Lost Sheep of the great Catholic Church; account of whom will be required atherhand.)“Iconoclasm at Bristol.—Our Bristol correspondent writes: The removal of the ‘imagery’ from the north porch of Bristol Cathedral has created considerable excitement in the city and in Clifton. As a member of the capitular body who is known to strongly object to the figures was seen near the Cathedral late on Wednesday night, the clerk of the works employed ‘watchers,’ his intention being to refuse admission to other than his own workmen. On Thursday morning he had occasion to leave the works to go to the quarries at Corsham, and while he was absent a gang of men, under the orders of the chapter clerk, entered the gates, and before the clerk of the works, who was telegraphed for, could[198]return, hauled down the four statues andobliterated all traces of the Virgin Mary, doing much damage to other carving in the process of removal. The last has by no means been heard of this affair. The statues cost over £100 each, but the money value of the ‘imagery’ is not considered by the Restoration Committee. Their contention is that, until the work was completed and handed over to the Cathedral body, it belonged to the Restoration Committee; and it is believed that the right of the Chapter to act as they have done will be tested in a court of law. Feeling is so strong against the action of the Dean and Chapter that plenty of money would be forthcoming to prosecute such an inquiry.”—Pall Mall Gazette, April 7, 1876.“One of the latest ‘sensations’ in New York has been a ‘female boxing match,’ aptly described by theNew York Timesas a ‘novel and nonsensical exhibition.’ The combatants—or ‘lady contestants,’ as they are called in the report of the proceedings—were two ballet-girls, of the kind known as ‘variety dancers.’ One, Miss Saunders, wore a white bodice, purple knee-breeches, which she had borrowed from an Ethiopian serenader, red stockings, and shoes. The other, Miss Harland, was attired in blue trunks and white tights. Both appeared nervous, were very pale, tried to blush, and ‘partially succeeded.’ When the fighting began, Miss Harland ‘did not know what to do with her hands.’ Miss Saunders, however, had her fists more at command, and, after some preliminary sparring, succeeded in striking her opponent ‘square in the face.’ Miss Harland, on her side, ‘by a vicious blow from the shoulder,’ managed to disarrange Miss Saunders’s back hair. Both ladies then smiled. In the end Miss Harland lost the match, ‘owing to her confirmed habit of swinging her hands around in the air.’ Miss Saunders was declared the winner, and carried off a prize of 200 dols. and a piece of silver plate; Miss Harland received[199]a ten-dollar bill from an amateur who thought she deserved consolation; and the two ‘lady contestants’ left the stage arm-in-arm.”—Pall Mall Gazette, April 7, 1876.IV. In last Fors, though I thought I knew my ‘Old Mortality’ well enough, I carelessly wrote ‘Elspeth,’ for ‘Elizabeth,’ (meaning Bessie Maclure); and the misprint ‘Arannah’ for ‘Araunah’ escaped my eyes three times over. The more grotesque one of ‘changes’ for ‘charges,’ in p. 168, line 25, was I suppose appointed by Fors to chastise me for incurable flirtation. I wish I knew who these two schoolgirls are, whom I’ve got to finish my letter to if I can, this time.My dears, will you please, for I can’t rewrite what I’ve said so often, read, when you have opportunity, the letter to a young lady in Fors 34, pp. 29, 30.6Respecting the third article in that letter, I have now a few words to add; (read also, if you can, what is said of the Word of God, in Letters 45 and 46). I told you in last Fors that you would have great difficulty in getting leave from English society to obey Christ. Fors has since sent me, in support of this statement, a paper called ‘The Christian,’—the number for Thursday, May 11,—in the fifteenth page of which is an article on young ladies headed “What can they do?” from which I take the following passage:—“There have been times of special prayer for young men and women. Could there not be also for the very large class of young ladies who do not go out into society? They have no home duties to detain them, as many in a humbler condition; they have hours and hours of leisure, and know not how to spend them—partly from need of being directed, but more so from the prejudices[200]and hindrances in their way. Their hearts are burning to do something for Christ, but they are not allowed, partly because it is considered ‘improper,’ and for a variety of reasons.“There is a cry on every side for labourers. There are numbers longing to respond; if not wholly to dedicate their lives, at least a portion of their days, to active Christian service, and only a wave of united prayer can throw these objections aside, and free the large band who are so willing.“A bright young Christian came to me this week. She is tired of meetings to which she is constantly taken, but never allowed to work in the inquiry-room at them,—hindered from taking up the least bit of work, till at last she cannot evenaskfor it. Almost to ‘kill time,’ she has taken up a secular corresponding agency.”Now that it is ‘considered improper’ by the world that you should do anything for Christ, is entirely true, and always true; and therefore it was that your Godfathers and Godmothers, in your name, renounced the “vain pomp and glory of the world,” with all covetous desires of the same—see baptismal service—(I wonder if you had pretty names—won’t you tell me?) but I much doubt if you, either privately or from the pulpit of your doubtless charming church, have ever been taught what the “vain pomp and glory of the world” was.Well, do you want to be better dressed than your schoolfellows? Some of them are probably poor, and cannot afford to dress like you; or, on the other hand, you may be poor yourselves, and may be mortified at their being dressed better than you. Putanend to all that at once, by resolving to go down into the deep of your girl’s heart, where you will find, inlaid by Christ’s own hand, a better thing than vanity; pity. And be sure of this, that, although in a truly Christian land, every young girl would be dressed beautifully and delightfully,—in this entirely heathen and Baal-worshipping land of ours, not one girl in ten has either decent or healthy clothing, and that you have no[201]business now to wear anything fine yourself, but are bound to use your full strength and resources to dress as many of your poor neighbours as you can. What of fine dress your people insist upon your wearing, take—and wear proudly and prettily, for their sakes; but, so far as in you lies, be sure that every day you are labouring to clothe some poorer creatures. And if you cannot clothe, at least help, with your hands. You can make your own bed; wash your own plate; brighten your own furniture,—if nothing else.‘But that’s servant’s work’? Of course it is. What business have you to hope to be better than a servant of servants? ‘God made you a lady’? Yes, he has put you, that is to say, in a position in which you may learn to speak your own language beautifully; to be accurately acquainted with the elements of other languages; to behave with grace, tact, and sympathy to all around you; to know the history of your country, the commands of its religion, and the duties of its race. If you obey His will in learning these things, you will obtain the power of becoming a true ‘lady;’ and you will become one, if while you learn these things you set yourself, with all the strength of your youth and womanhood, to serve His servants, until the day come when He calls you to say, “Well done, good and faithful servant: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”You may thus become a Christ’s lady, or you may, if you will, become a Belial’s lady, taking Belial’s gift of miserable idleness, living on the labour and shame of others, anddeceivingthem and yourself by lies about Providence, until you perish in hell with the rest of such, shrieking the bitter cry, “When saw weThee?”V.“3, Athole Crescent, Perth,10th May, 1876.“Sir,—Thinking that it may interest you, I take the liberty of writing to let you know that the ‘Lead’ is not at all in the state[202]you suppose it to be; but still runs down, very clear, by the side of the North Inch and past Rose Terrace, and, judging from the numbers of them at this moment playing by it, affords no small delight to the children.“I am, yours most respectfully,“A Reader of ‘Fors.’”VI.“Easthampstead Rectory, Bracknell,“April 20, 1876.“My dear Ruskin,—I have just received this month’s ‘Fors,’ but not read it, (of course not; my friends never do, except to find the mistakes,) as I am off to Dublin, but as regards Psalm lxxxvii., (note, p. 110,) I expounded it in a sermon some time since, and was talking of it to a very learned Hebraist last Monday. Rahab, there, is generally understood to mean ‘the monster,’ and has nothing to do, beyond resemblance of sound, with Rahab the harlot. And the monster is the crocodile, as typical of Egypt. In Psalm lxxxix. 10, (the Bible version, not the Prayer Book,) you will see Rahab explained in the margin, by ‘or Egypt.’“Perhaps Rahab the harlot was called by the same name from the rapacity of her class, just as in Latinlupa.“The whole Psalm is badly translated, and, as we have it, unintelligible. But it is really charged with deep prophetical meaning. I cannot write more, so believe me,“Ever yours affectionately,“O. Gordon.“I hope you will have had a pleasant journey when you receive this. The Greek Septuagint is much better than the English, but not good. As regards the general meaning, you have divined it very correctly.”[203]

Brantwood,14th May, 1876.

Those of my readers who have followed me as far as I have hitherto gone in our careful reading of the Pentateuch, must, I think, have felt with me, in natural consequence of this careful reading, more than hitherto, the life and reality of the record; but, in the degree of this new life, new wonderfulness, and difficult credibility! For it is always easy to imagine that we believe what we do not understand; and often graceful and convenient to consent in the belief of others, as to what we do not care about. But when we begin to know clearly what is told, the question if it be fable or fact becomes inevitable in our minds; and if the fact, once admitted, would bear upon our conduct, its admission can no longer be made a matter of mere social courtesy.

Accordingly, I find one of my more earnest readers[172]already asking me, privately, if I really believed that the hail on Good Friday last had been sent as a punishment for national sin?—and I should think, and even hope, that other of my readers would like to ask me, respecting the same passage, whether I believed that the sun ever stood still?

To whom I could only answer, what I answered some time since in my paper on Miracle for the Metaphysical Society, (‘Contemporary Review’) that the true miracle, to my mind, would not be in the sun’s standing still, but IS in its going on! We are all of us being swept down to death in a sea of miracle; we are drowned in wonder, as gnats in a Rhine whirlpool: unless we are worse,—drowned in pleasure, or sloth, or insolence.

Nevertheless, I do not feel myself in the least called upon to believe that the sun stood still, or the earth either, during that pursuit at Ajalon. Nay, it would not anywise amaze me to find that there never had been any such pursuit—never any Joshua, never any Moses; and that the Jews, “taken generally,” as an amiable clerical friend told me from his pulpit a Sunday or two ago, “were a Christian people.”

But it does amaze me—almost to helplessness of hand and thought—to find the men and women of these days careless of such issue; and content, so that they can feed and breathe their fill, to eat like cattle, and breathe like plants, questionless of the Spirit that makes the grass to grow for them on the mountains, or the[173]breeze they breathe on them, its messengers, or the fire that dresses their food, its minister. Desolate souls, for whom the sun—beneath, not above, the horizon—stands still for ever.

‘Amazed,’ I say, ‘almost to helplessness of hand and thought’—quite literally of both. I was reading yesterday, by Fors’ order, Mr. Edward B. Tylor’s idea of the Greek faith in Apollo: “If the sun travels along its course like a glittering chariot, forthwith the wheels, and the driver, and the horses are there;”1and Mr. Frederick Harrison’s gushing article on Humanity, in the ‘Contemporary Review’; and a letter about our Cotton Industry, (hereafter to be quoted,2) and this presently following bit of Sir Philip Sidney’s 68th Psalm;—and my hands are cold this morning, after the horror, and wonder, and puzzlement of my total Sun-less-day, and my head is now standing still, or at least turning round, giddy, instead of doing its work by Shrewsbury clock; and I don’t know where to begin with the quantity I want to say,—all the less that I’ve said a great deal of it before, if I only knew where to tell you to find it. All up and down my later books, from ‘Unto This Last’ to ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ and again and again throughout ‘Fors,’[174]you will find references to the practical connection between physical and spiritual light—of which now I would fain state, in the most unmistakable terms, this sum: that you cannot love the real sun, that is to say physical light and colour, rightly, unless you love the spiritual sun, that is to say justice and truth, rightly. That for unjust and untrue persons, there is no real joy in physical light, so that they don’t even know what the word means. That the entire system of modern life is so corrupted with the ghastliest forms of injustice and untruth, carried to the point of not recognising themselves as either—for as long as Bill Sykes knows that he is a robber, and Jeremy Diddler that he is a rascal, there is still some of Heaven’s light left for both—but when everybody steals, cheats, and goes to church, complacently, and the light of their whole body is darkness, how great is that darkness! And that the physical result of that mental vileness is a total carelessness of the beauty of sky, or the cleanness of streams, or the life of animals and flowers: and I believe that the powers of Nature are depressed or perverted, together with the Spirit of Man; and therefore that conditions of storm and of physical darkness, such as never were before in Christian times, are developing themselves, in connection also with forms of loathsome insanity, multiplying through the whole genesis of modern brains.

As I correct this sheet for press, I chance, by Fors’[175]order, in a prayer of St. John Damascene’s to the Virgin, on this, to me, very curious and interesting clause: “Redeem me from the dark metamorphosis of the angels, rescuing me from the bitter law-giving of the farmers of the air, and the rulers of the darkness.”

“τῆς σκοτεινῆς με τῶν διαμόνων λυτρου μέτημορφῆς, (I am not answerable either for Damascene Greek, or for my MS. of it, in 1396,)τοῦ πικροτάτου λογοθεσίου τῶν τελωνῶν τοῦ ἀέρος καὶ τῶν ἀρχόντων τοῦ σκότους ἐξαίρουσα.”

And now—of this entangling in the shrine of half born and half-sighted things, see this piece of Sir Philip Sidney’s psalm. I want it also for the bit of conchology at the end. The italics are mine.

“And call ye this to utter what is just,You that of justice hold the sov’raign throne?And call yee this to yield, O sonnes of dust,To wronged brethren ev’ry one his own?O no: it is your long malicious willNow to the world to make by practice known,With whose oppression you the ballance fill,Just to your selves, indiff’rent else to none.But what could they, who ev’n in birth declin’d,From truth and right to lies and injuries?To shew thevenom of their cancred myndThe adder’s image scarcely can suffice.[176]Nay, scarce the aspick may with them contend,On whom the charmer all in vaine appliesHis skillful’st spells: aye, missing of his end,While sheeself-deaf, and unaffectedlies.Lord, crack their teeth, Lord, crush Thou these lions’ jawes,Soe lett them sinck as water in the sand:When deadly bow their aiming fury drawes,Shiver the shaft, ere past the shooter’s hand.So make them melt as the dishowsed snaile,Or as the embrio, whose vitall bandBreakes ere it holdes, and formlesse eyes doe faileTo see the sun, though brought to lightfull land.”

“And call ye this to utter what is just,You that of justice hold the sov’raign throne?And call yee this to yield, O sonnes of dust,To wronged brethren ev’ry one his own?O no: it is your long malicious willNow to the world to make by practice known,With whose oppression you the ballance fill,Just to your selves, indiff’rent else to none.

“And call ye this to utter what is just,

You that of justice hold the sov’raign throne?

And call yee this to yield, O sonnes of dust,

To wronged brethren ev’ry one his own?

O no: it is your long malicious will

Now to the world to make by practice known,

With whose oppression you the ballance fill,

Just to your selves, indiff’rent else to none.

But what could they, who ev’n in birth declin’d,From truth and right to lies and injuries?To shew thevenom of their cancred myndThe adder’s image scarcely can suffice.[176]Nay, scarce the aspick may with them contend,On whom the charmer all in vaine appliesHis skillful’st spells: aye, missing of his end,While sheeself-deaf, and unaffectedlies.

But what could they, who ev’n in birth declin’d,

From truth and right to lies and injuries?

To shew thevenom of their cancred mynd

The adder’s image scarcely can suffice.[176]

Nay, scarce the aspick may with them contend,

On whom the charmer all in vaine applies

His skillful’st spells: aye, missing of his end,

While sheeself-deaf, and unaffectedlies.

Lord, crack their teeth, Lord, crush Thou these lions’ jawes,Soe lett them sinck as water in the sand:When deadly bow their aiming fury drawes,Shiver the shaft, ere past the shooter’s hand.So make them melt as the dishowsed snaile,Or as the embrio, whose vitall bandBreakes ere it holdes, and formlesse eyes doe faileTo see the sun, though brought to lightfull land.”

Lord, crack their teeth, Lord, crush Thou these lions’ jawes,

Soe lett them sinck as water in the sand:

When deadly bow their aiming fury drawes,

Shiver the shaft, ere past the shooter’s hand.

So make them melt as the dishowsed snaile,

Or as the embrio, whose vitall band

Breakes ere it holdes, and formlesse eyes doe faile

To see the sun, though brought to lightfull land.”

‘Dishoused’ snail! That’s a bit, observe, of Sir Philip’s own natural history, perfecting the image in the psalm, “as a snail which melteth.” The ‘housed’ snail can shelter himself from evil weather, but the poor houseless slug, a mere slimy mass of helpless blackness,—shower-begotten, as it seems,—what is to become ofitwhen the sun is up!

Not that even houseless snails melt,—nor that there’s anything about snails at all in David’s psalm, I believe, both Vulgate and LXX. saying ‘wax’ instead, as in Psalms lxviii. 2, xcvii. 5, etc.; but I suppose there’s some reptilian sense in the Hebrew, justifying our translation here—all the more interesting to me[177]because of a puzzle I got into in Isaiah, the other day; respecting which, lest you should fancy I’m too ready to give up Joshua and the sun without taking trouble about them, please observe this very certain condition of your Scriptural studies: that if you read the Bible with predetermination to pick out every text you approve of—that is to say, generally, any that confirm you in the conceit of your own religious sect,—that console you for the consequences of your own faults,—or assure you of a pleasant future though you attend to none of your present duties—on these terms you will find the Bible entirely intelligible, and wholly delightful: but if you read it with a real purpose of trying to understand it, and obey; and so read it all through, steadily, you will find it, out and out, the crabbedest and most difficult book you ever tried; horribly ill written in many parts, according to all human canons; totally unintelligible in others; and with the gold of it only to be got at by a process of crushing in which nothing but the iron teeth of the fiercest and honestest resolution will prevail against its adamant.

For instance, take the 16th of Isaiah. Who is to send the Lamb? why is the Lamb to be sent? what does the Lamb mean? There is nothing in the Greek Bible about a Lamb at all, nor is anybody told to send anything. But God saysHewill send something, apostolically, as reptiles!

Then, are the daughters of Moab the outcasts, as[178]in the second verse, or other people, as in the fourth? How is Moab’s throne to be established in righteousness, in the tabernacle of David, in the fifth? What are his lies not to be, in the sixth? And why is he to howl for himself, in the seventh? Ask any of the young jackanapes you put up to chatter out of your pulpits, to tell you even so much as this, of the first half-dozen verses! But above all, ask them who the persons are who are to be sent apostolically as reptiles?

Meanwhile, on the way to answer, I’ve got a letter,3not from a jackanapes, but a thoroughly learned and modest clergyman, and old friend, advising me of my mistake in April Fors, in supposing that Rahab, in the 89th Psalm, means the harlot. It is, he tells me, a Hebrew word for the Dragon adversary, as in the verse “He hath cut Rahab, and wounded the Dragon.” That will come all the clearer and prettier for us, when we have worked it out, with Rahab herself and all; meantime, please observe what a busy creature she must have been—the stalks of her flax in heaps enough to hide the messengers! doubtless also, she was able to dye her thread of the brightest scarlet, a becoming colour.4

Well, I can’t get that paper of Mr. Frederick Harrison’s out of my head; chiefly because I know and like its writer; and Idon’tlike his wasting his time in writing[179]that sort of stuff. What I have got to say to him, anent it, may better be said publicly, because I must write it carefully, and with some fulness; and if he won’t attend to me, perhaps some of his readers may. So I consider him, for the time, as one of my acquaintances among working men, and dedicate the close of this letter to him specially.

My dear Harrison,—I am very glad you have been enjoying yourself at Oxford; and that you still think it a pretty place. But why, in the name of all that’s developing, did you walk in those wretched old Magdalen walks? They’re as dull as they were thirty years ago. Why didn’t you promenade in our new street, opposite Mr. Ryman’s? or under the rapturous sanctities of Keble? or beneath the lively new zigzag parapet of Tom Quad?—or, finally, in the name of all that’s human and progressive, why not up and down the elongating suburb of the married Fellows, on the cock-horse road to Banbury?

However, I’m glad you’ve been at the old place; even though you wasted the bloom of your holiday-spirits in casting your eyes, in that too childish and pastoral manner, “round this sweet landscape, with its myriad blossoms and foliage, its meadows in their golden glory,” etc.; and declaring that all you want other people to do is to “follow out in its concrete results this sense of collective evolution.” Will you only be patient enough, for the help of this old head of mine[180]on stooping shoulders, to tell me one or two of the inconcrete results of separate evolution?

Had you done me the honour to walk through my beautifully developing schools, you would have found, just outside of them, (turned out because I’m tired of seeing it, and want something progressive) the cast of the Elgin Theseus. I am tired thereof, it is true; but I don’t yet see my way, as a Professor of Modern Art, to the superseding it. On the whole, it appears to me a very satisfactory type of the human form; arrived at, as you know, two thousand and two hundred years ago. And you tell me, nevertheless, to “see how this transcendent power of collective evolution holdsmein the hollow of its hand!” Well, I hope Iamhandsomer than the Theseus; it’s very pleasant to think so, but it did not strike me before. May I flatter myself it is really your candid opinion? Will you just look at the “Realization of the (your?) Ideal,” in the number of ‘Vanity Fair’ for February 17th, 1872, and confirm me on this point?

Granting whatever advance in the ideal of humanity you thus conclude, I still am doubtful of your next reflection. “But these flowers and plants which we can see between the cloisters, and trellised round the grey traceries—” (My dear boy, what haveyouto do with cloisters or traceries? Leave that business to the jackdaws; their loquacious and undeveloped praise is enough for such relics of the barbarous past. You don’t want[181]to shut yourself up, do you? and you couldn’t design a tracery, for your life; and you don’t know a good one from a bad one: what in the name of common sense or common modesty do you mean by chattering about these?) “What races of men in China, Japan, India, Mexico, South America, Australasia, first developed their glory out of some wild bloom?” Frankly, I don’t know—being in this no wiser than you; but also I don’t care: and in this carelessnessamwiser than you, because Idoknow this—that if you will look into the Etruscan room of the British Museum, you will find there an Etruscan Demeter of—any time you please—B.C., riding on a car whose wheels are of wild roses: that the wild rose ofhertime is thus proved to be precisely the wild rose ofmytime, growing behind my study on the hillside; and for my own part, I would not give a spray of it for all Australasia, South America, and Japan together. Perhaps, indeed, apples have improved since the Hesperides’ time; but I know they haven’t improved since I was a boy, and I can’t get a Ribston Pippin, now, for love or money.

Of Pippins in Devonshire, of cheese in Cheshire, believe me, my good friend,—though I trust much more than you in the glorified future of both,—you will find no development in the present scientific day;—of Asphodel none; of Apples none demonstrable; but of Eves? From the ductile and silent gold of ancient womanhood to the resonant bronze, and tinkling—not cymbal, but[182]shall we say—saucepan, of Miss Frances Power Cobbe, thereisan interval, with a vengeance; widening to the future. You yourself, I perceive, have no clear insight into this solidified dispersion of the lingering pillar of Salt, whichhadbeen good for hospitality in its day; and which yet would have some honour in its descendant, the poor gleaning Moabitess, into your modern windily progressive pillar of Sand, with “career open to it” indeed other than that of wife and mother—good for nothing, at last, but burial heaps. But are you indeed so proud of what has been already achieved? I will take you on your own terms, and study only the evolution of the Amazonian Virgin. Take first the ancient type of her, leading the lucent Cobbes of her day, ‘florentes aere catervas.’

“Bellatrix. Non illa colo, calathisve MinervaeFoemineas assueta manus.Illam omnis tectis agrisqu’ effusa juventusTurbaque miratur matrum; et prospectat euntem.Attonitis inhians animis: ut regius ostroVelet honos leves humeros; ut fibula crinemAuro internectat; Lyciam ut gerat ipsa pharetramEt pastoralem praefixa cuspide myrtum.”

“Bellatrix. Non illa colo, calathisve Minervae

Foemineas assueta manus.

Illam omnis tectis agrisqu’ effusa juventus

Turbaque miratur matrum; et prospectat euntem.

Attonitis inhians animis: ut regius ostro

Velet honos leves humeros; ut fibula crinem

Auro internectat; Lyciam ut gerat ipsa pharetram

Et pastoralem praefixa cuspide myrtum.”

With this picture, will you compare that so opportunely furnished me by the author of the ‘Angel in the House,’5of the modern Camilla, in “white[183]bodice, purple knee-breeches, which she had borrowed from an Ethiopian serenader, red stockings, and shoes.” From this sphere of Ethiopian aspiration, may not even the divinely emancipated spirit of Cobbe cast one glance—“Backward, Ho”?

But suppose I grant your Evolution of the Japanese Rose, and the Virginian Virago, how of other creatures? of other things? I don’t find the advocates of Evolution much given to studying either men, women, or roses; I perceive them to be mostly occupied with frogs and lice. Is there a Worshipful Batrachianity—a Divine Pedicularity?—Stay, I see at page 874 that Pantheism is “muddled sentiment”; but it was you, my dear boy, who began the muddling with your Japanese horticulture.YourHumanity has no more to do with roses than with Rose-chafers or other vermin; but I must really beg you not to muddle your terms as well as your head. “We, whohavethought and studied,” do not admit that “humanity is an aggregate of men.” An aggregate of men is a mob, and not ‘Humanity’; and an aggregate of sheep is a flock, and not Ovility; and an aggregate of geese is——perhaps you had better consult Mr. Herbert Spencer and the late Mr. John Stuart Mill for the best modern expression,—but if you want to know the proper names for aggregates, in good old English, go and read Lady Juliana’s list in the book of St. Albans.

I do not care, however, to pursue questions with you[184]of these ‘concrete developments.’ For, frankly, I conceive myself to know considerably more than you do, of organic Nature and her processes, and of organic English and its processes; but there is one development of which, since it is your special business to know it, and I suppose your pleasure, I hope you know much more than I do, (whose business I find by no means forwarded by it, still less my pleasure)—the Development of Law. For the concrete development of beautifully bewigged humanity, called a lawyer, I beg you to observe that I always express, and feel, extreme respect. But for Law itself, in the existent form of it, invented, as it appears to me, only for the torment and taxation of Humanity, I entertain none whatsoever. I may be wrong, and I don’t want to be wrong; and you, who know the law, can show me if I am wrong or not. Here, then, are four questions of quite vital importance to Humanity, which if you will answer to me positively, you will do more good than I have yet known done by Positivism.

1. What is ‘Usury’ as defined by existing Law?

2. Is Usury, as defined by existing law, an absolute term, such as Theft, or Adultery? and is a man therefore a Usurer who only commits Usury a little, as a man is an Adulterer who only commits Adultery a little?

3. Or is it a sin incapable of strict definition, or strictly retributive punishment; like ‘Cruelty’? and is a man criminal in proportion to the quantity of it he commits?[185]

4. If criminal in proportion to the quantity he commits, is the proper legal punishment in the direct ratio of the quantity, or inverse ratio of the quantity, as it is in the case of theft?

If you will answer these questions clearly, you will do more service to Humanity than by writing any quantity of papers either on its Collective Development or its Abstract being. I have not touched upon any of the more grave questions glanced at in your paper, because in your present Mercutial temper I cannot expect you to take cognizance of anything grave. With respect to such matters, I will “ask for you to-morrow,” not to-day. But here—to end my Fors with a piece of pure English,—are two little verses of Sir Philip’s, merry enough, in measure, to be set to a Fandango if you like. I may, perhaps, some time or other, ask you if you can apply them personally, in address to Mr. Comte. For the nonce I only ask you the above four plain questions of English law; and I adjure you, by the soul of every Comes reckoned up in unique Comte—by all that’s positive, all that’s progressive, all that’s spiral, all that’s conchoidal, and all that’s evolute—great Human Son of Holothurian Harries, answer me.

“Since imprisoned in my motherThou me feed’st, whom have I otherHeld my stay, or made my song?[186]Yea, when all me so misdeemed,I to most a monster seemedYet in thee my hope was strong.Yet of thee the thankful storyFilled my mouth: thy gratious gloryWas my ditty all the day.Do not then, now age assaileth,Courage, verdure, vertue faileth,Do not leave me cast away.”

“Since imprisoned in my motherThou me feed’st, whom have I otherHeld my stay, or made my song?[186]Yea, when all me so misdeemed,I to most a monster seemedYet in thee my hope was strong.

“Since imprisoned in my mother

Thou me feed’st, whom have I other

Held my stay, or made my song?[186]

Yea, when all me so misdeemed,

I to most a monster seemed

Yet in thee my hope was strong.

Yet of thee the thankful storyFilled my mouth: thy gratious gloryWas my ditty all the day.Do not then, now age assaileth,Courage, verdure, vertue faileth,Do not leave me cast away.”

Yet of thee the thankful story

Filled my mouth: thy gratious glory

Was my ditty all the day.

Do not then, now age assaileth,

Courage, verdure, vertue faileth,

Do not leave me cast away.”

I have little space, as now too often, for any definite school work. My writing-lesson, this month, is a facsimile of the last words written by Nelson; in his cabin, with the allied fleets in sight, off Trafalgar. It is entirely fine in general structure and character.

Mr. Ward has now three, and will I hope soon have the fourth, of our series of lesson photographs, namely,—

On these I shall lecture, as I have time, here and in the ‘Laws of Fésole;’ but, in preparation for all farther study, when you have got the four, put them beside each other, putting the Leucothea first, the Lippi second, and the others as numbered.[187]

Then, the first, the Leucothea, is entirely noble religious art, of the fifth or sixth centuryB.C., full of various meaning and mystery, of knowledges that are lost, feelings that have ceased, myths and symbols of the laws of life, only to be traced by those who know much both of life and death.

Technically, it is still in Egyptian bondage, but in course of swiftly progressive redemption.

The second is nobly religious work of the fifteenth century of Christ,—an example of the most perfect unison of religious myth with faithful realism of human nature yet produced in this world. The Etruscan traditions are preserved in it even to the tassels of the throne cushion: the pattern of these, and of the folds at the edge of the angel’s drapery, may be seen in the Etruscan tomb now central in the first compartment of the Egyptian gallery of the British Museum and the double cushion of that tomb is used, with absolute obedience to his tradition, by Jacopo della Quercia, in the tomb of Ilaria di Caretto.

The third represents the last phase of the noble religious art of the world, in which realization has become consummate; but all supernatural aspect is refused, and mythic teaching is given only in obedience to former tradition, but with no anxiety for its acceptance. Here is, for certain, a sweet Venetian peasant, with her child, and fruit from the market-boats of Mestre. The Ecce Agnus, topsy-turvy on the[188]finely perspectived scroll, may be deciphered by whoso list.

But the work itself is still sternly conscientious, severe, reverent, and faultless.

The fourth is an example of the highest reach of technical perfection yet reached in art; all effort and labour seeming to cease in the radiant peace and simplicity of consummated human power. But all belief in supernatural things, all hope of a future state, all effort to teach, and all desire to be taught have passed away from the artist’s mind. The Child and her Dog are to him equally real, equally royal, equally mortal. And the History of Art since it reached this phase—cannot be given in the present number of ‘Fors Clavigera.’[189]

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.I. Affairs of the Company.No. 50. G. £10 10s.This is a subscription of five guineas for each year: this amount completes that sum (with the £15 15s.which appeared at p. 65, February Fors) for each of the five years.The publication of the following letter, with its answer, will, I hope, not cause Mr. Tarrant any further displeasure. I have only in the outset to correct his statement that the payment of £10 14s.11d.was onmybehalf. It is simply payment to another lawyer. And my first statement was absolutely accurate; I never said Mr. Tarrant had himself taxed, but that he had been “employed in taxing”; I do not concern myself with more careful analysis, when the accounts are all in print. My accusation is against the ‘legal profession generally,’ not against a firm which I have chosen as an entirely trustworthy one, to be employed both in St. George’s business and my own.2, Bond Court, Walbrook,25th April, 1876.Dear Mr. Ruskin,—I have the April ‘Fors,’ in which I see you have published our account of costs against you, amounting to £47 13s.4d.The document was yours, and you had a perfect right to lay it before your readers, but you are the first client who has ever thought it necessary to put such a document of mine to such a use. I don’t know, however, that it will do me any injury, although the statement preceding it is somewhat inaccurate,[190]because our costs of the transfer of the Sheffield property were £26 15s.11d., which included a payment of £10 14s.11d.made on your behalf, leaving our costs at £16 1s., the other portion of the £47 13s.4d.being costs relating to the constitution of the St. George’s Company, leaving altogether £29 14s.11d.only payable to us beyond money paid on your account. It is hardly fair, therefore, to say that Iemployed myselfin taxing the transfer of the property to nearly £50.As to the charge for letters (the writing of which is really not brickmakers’ work), you must bear in mind that the entire of your matters had to be done by correspondence, for which you are fairly chargeable; and I cannot accuse myself of having written a single letter that was unnecessary.As to the position of the St. George’s Company, it is not a legal company, if by that you mean a company recognized by law: it has neither the advantages nor disadvantages of companies incorporated in accordance with the provisions of the several Acts of Parliament relating to such matters. It is not a legal trust of a charitable nature, if by that term be meant a trust which is liable to the supervision or interference of the Charity Commissioners. It is a number of persons unincorporated, but associated for other purposes than that of gain. It is on a similar footing to such a society as that for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. The Master will be personally responsible for the debts of the Company contracted by his order. If you desire to have a legal-Company, or the supervision of the Charity Commissioners, you must give way in many points which you have hitherto considered indispensable to your scheme. On the 29th February last we sent you a specimen of the form in which we proposed to draw up the memorandum for each Companion to subscribe. If you will return us this with any remarks upon it which may occur to you, we will at once have it engrossed, and send it you to be signed by all the Companions.[191]We were expecting a call from you when you were in town some time since, and should have then have discussed this subject with you, and also the subject of the trust deed which will have to be executed by the Master of the Company.We will act upon your suggestion, and forward the deed of the Sheffield property to Mr. Bagshawe. Shall I also send all the title deeds to him relating to the property? Tell me this.Faithfully yours,W. P. Tarrant.Professor Ruskin,Arthur Severn, Esq., Herne Hill, S.E.(Answer.)Patterdale,6th May, 1876Dear Mr. Tarrant,—I was surprised and vexed by the opening of your letter of 25th April, showing that you had not in the least hitherto understood the scope or meaning of my present work. There is not the smallest unfriendliness in my publication of your account. No client ever had occasion to do it before, of course;—you never had a client before engaged in steady and lifelong contest with the existing principles of the Law, the Church, and the Army,—had you? The publication of your accounts of course can do you no harm, if they are fair; nor have, or had I, the slightest idea of their being otherwise. All accounts for St. George are to be printed: the senders-in must look to the consequences.The delay in my returning your draft of the rules of Company is because every lawyer I speak to tells me of a new difficulty. The whole piece of business, you remember, arose from my request to you simply to secure a piece of ground to our trustees, which had been given us by Mr. Baker. Now I find at the last moment that neither Mr. Baker nor anybody else cangiveus a piece of land at all, but must sell it us.Next, I want to know if this form, as you have drawn it up,[192]is approved by me, what are you going to do with it? What is the good of it? Will the writing of it in black letter make us a legal company, like a railway company, capable of holding land? Do the Charity Commissioners interfere withtheirbusiness? or must we blow some people to bits or smash them into jelly, to prove our want of charity,—and get leave, therefore, to do what we like with our own?Fix your minds, and Mr. Barber’s, on this one point—the grip of the land. If you can’t give us that, send us in your accounts, and let us be done with the matter. If you can, on the document as it stands, write it out on the rubbish your modern stationers call parchment, and do what you will with it, so.I am really ashamed to give any farther account, just now, of the delays in our land work, or of little crosses and worries blocking my first attempt at practice. One of the men whom I thought I had ready for this Worcestershire land, being ordered, for trial, to do a little bit of rough work in Yorkshire that I might not torment Mr. Baker with his freshmanship, threw up the task at once, writing me a long letter of which one sentence was enough for me,—that “he would dohis share, but no more.” These infernal notions of Equality and Independence are so rooted, now, even in the best men’s minds, that they don’t so much as know even what Obedience or Fellowship mean! Fancy one of Nelson’s or Lord Cochrane’s men retreating from his gun, with the avowed resolution to ‘do no more than his share’! However, I know there’s good in this man, and I doubt not he will repent, and break down no more; but I shall not try him again for a year. And I must be forgiven my St. George’s accounts this month. I really can’t let the orchises and hyacinths go out of flower while I’m trying to cast sums; and I’ve been two whole days at work on the[193]purple marsh orchis alone, which my botanical readers will please observe is in St. George’s schools to be called ‘Porphyria veris,’ ‘Spring Purplet.’ It is, I believe, Ophelia’s “long purple.” There are a quantity of new names to be invented for the whole tribe, their present ones being not by St. George endurable.The subjoined letter gives me great pleasure: it is from a son of my earliest Oxford friend: who, as his father helped me in educating myself, is now helping me in the education of others. I print it entire; it may give some of my readers an idea of the minor hindrances which meet one at every step, and take as much time to conquer as large ones. The work to be done is to place a series of the simple chemical elements as ‘Imps’ in a pretty row of poetical Bottles at Sheffield.“Broad Street, Oxford,March 30, 1876.“My dear Mr. Ruskin,—I knocked in vain at your ‘oak’ last night when I came to Corpus to report progress, and also to ask you two questions, which must be put to you by letter, as there is not much time to lose if you wish to have the alkaline earths ready by the time you go to Sheffield. Firstly, do you wish me to see about getting themetalsof the alkalies, and if so which of them do you want? Some of them are extremely expensive,—calcium, for instance, being 2d.a grain; but then, as it is very light a very small quantity would be required as a specimen. The other questions were about the amount of the oxides, and about the shape of the bottles to hold them. I have in your absence chosen some long sample bottles which are very beautiful of their kind, and even if they do not meet your approval they can easily be changed when you return to Oxford. I am progressing fairly well with the earths—Magnesia is ready; Alumina and Baryta partly made, but not yet pure, for it is not more easy in chemistry to get a perfect thing than in any other matter with which man has anything to do, and to-day I have been extremely unfortunate[194]with the Baryta, having tried two methods of making it, broken four crucibles, and, worst of all, failed to make it in a state of purity: however I shall have one more try to-morrow, and no doubt shall succeed. If there is any chance of your being in Oxford before Easter, I will not make the Silica, since the process is very beautiful, and one which no doubt you would like to see. Please excuse the length of my letter, and believe me,“Affectionately yours,“Theodore D. Acland.”II. Affairs of the Master.I am aghast at the columnar aspect of any account given in satisfactory detail; and will only gradually, as I have space, illustrate my own expenditure and its course. That unexplained hundred of last month, diminished itself, I find, thus:£s.d.Pocket1000Klein, (final account on dismissal to Rotterdam, paying his passage, and a shilling or two over)3000Downs, for my London quarterly pensioners2500Morley, (Oxford bookbinding)316Easter presents5007316Leaving a balance of26186to be added to the £200 of personal expenses in this month’s accounts. About a hundred and twenty of this has gone in a fortnight’s posting, with Mr. and Mrs. Severn, from London to Coniston, stopping to see St. Albans, Peterborough, Croyland, Stamford and Burleigh, Grantham, Newark, Lincoln, our new ground at Sheffield, Pomfret, Knaresborough, Ripon, Fountain’s, Richmond, Mortham Tower, and Brougham Castle. A pleasant life, you think? Yes,—if I led an unpleasant one, however dutiful, I could not write any of my books, least of all, Fors. But I am glad, if you honestly think it a pleasant life;why, if[195]so, my richer readers, do you drive only round the parks, every day, instead of from place to place through England, learning a thing or two on the road? Of the rest of the ‘self’ money, I leave further account till next month: it is not all gone yet. I give, however, for a typical example, one of Downs’s weekly bills, reaching the symmetrical total of £7 7s.7d., or a guinea and a penny a day, which I think is about the average. Of the persons named therein as receiving weekly wage, Hersey is our old under-gardener, now rheumatic, and as little able to earn his dinner as I am myself; Rusch, my old lapidary, who cuts in the course of the week what pebbles he can for me; Best, an old coachman, who used to come to us from livery-stable on occasion, and now can’t drive any more; Christy, an old woman who used to work for my mother.1876.£s.d.April22.Cash in hand3012829.Men’s Wages410Coachman’s Book11610Charities0160Sundries0139£777April29.Balance in hand£2351Men’s Wages.£s.d.April29.David Downs1150Thomas Hersey150John Rusch110£410Coachman’s Book.£s.d.April29.Plate Powder, 1s.; Oil, 10d.0110Soap and Sand010Wages1140£11610[196]Charities.£s.d.William Best0100Mrs. Christy060£0160Sundries.£s.d.April22.Postage00524.Rail and ’Bus, British Museum010Cord for Boxes, 1s.6d.; Postage, 1s.6½d.030½25.Horse and Cart, Boxes to Station076Carman, 1s.; Booking ditto, 6d.016Postage00126and 28. Postage002½£0139After thus much of miniature illustration, I have only to explain of the broad effects in the account below, that my Oxford secretary, who has £200 a year, does such work for me connected with my Professorship as only a trained scholar could do, leaving me free here to study hyacinths. I wish I could give him the Professorship itself, but must do as I am bid by Oxford. My younger secretary, who has £100 a year, is this year put into office, for St. George’s correspondence; and I must beg my good friends—now, I am thankful to say, gathering a little to St. George’s work,—not to think themselves slighted in being answered by his hand, for mine is weary.1876.£s.d.April16.Balance1511101May1.Half-year’s Stipend of Slade Professorship179001690101464110Balance, May 16th£1225191[197]April20and 30. Self2000020.Downs500022.Photographs (Leucothea and Lippi)165025.Tailor’s Account3360May 1.Oxford Secretary100001.Raffaelle for May and June150015.Burgess5000£464110III.“Hastings,May 15.“My dear Ruskin,—I enclose two extracts, cut from the same day’s paper, which contain so grimly humorous a parallel between the ways in which the ‘Protestant Church’ and ‘the world’ are engaged in ‘obliterating all traces of the Virgin Mary,’ that I thought you might possibly use them in ‘Fors’ or elsewhere.“Yours affectionately,“C. Patmore.”(The following are the two extracts. Before giving them, I must reply to my greatly honoured and loved friend, that both the Bristol destroyers of images and New York destroyers of humanity, are simply—Lost Sheep of the great Catholic Church; account of whom will be required atherhand.)“Iconoclasm at Bristol.—Our Bristol correspondent writes: The removal of the ‘imagery’ from the north porch of Bristol Cathedral has created considerable excitement in the city and in Clifton. As a member of the capitular body who is known to strongly object to the figures was seen near the Cathedral late on Wednesday night, the clerk of the works employed ‘watchers,’ his intention being to refuse admission to other than his own workmen. On Thursday morning he had occasion to leave the works to go to the quarries at Corsham, and while he was absent a gang of men, under the orders of the chapter clerk, entered the gates, and before the clerk of the works, who was telegraphed for, could[198]return, hauled down the four statues andobliterated all traces of the Virgin Mary, doing much damage to other carving in the process of removal. The last has by no means been heard of this affair. The statues cost over £100 each, but the money value of the ‘imagery’ is not considered by the Restoration Committee. Their contention is that, until the work was completed and handed over to the Cathedral body, it belonged to the Restoration Committee; and it is believed that the right of the Chapter to act as they have done will be tested in a court of law. Feeling is so strong against the action of the Dean and Chapter that plenty of money would be forthcoming to prosecute such an inquiry.”—Pall Mall Gazette, April 7, 1876.“One of the latest ‘sensations’ in New York has been a ‘female boxing match,’ aptly described by theNew York Timesas a ‘novel and nonsensical exhibition.’ The combatants—or ‘lady contestants,’ as they are called in the report of the proceedings—were two ballet-girls, of the kind known as ‘variety dancers.’ One, Miss Saunders, wore a white bodice, purple knee-breeches, which she had borrowed from an Ethiopian serenader, red stockings, and shoes. The other, Miss Harland, was attired in blue trunks and white tights. Both appeared nervous, were very pale, tried to blush, and ‘partially succeeded.’ When the fighting began, Miss Harland ‘did not know what to do with her hands.’ Miss Saunders, however, had her fists more at command, and, after some preliminary sparring, succeeded in striking her opponent ‘square in the face.’ Miss Harland, on her side, ‘by a vicious blow from the shoulder,’ managed to disarrange Miss Saunders’s back hair. Both ladies then smiled. In the end Miss Harland lost the match, ‘owing to her confirmed habit of swinging her hands around in the air.’ Miss Saunders was declared the winner, and carried off a prize of 200 dols. and a piece of silver plate; Miss Harland received[199]a ten-dollar bill from an amateur who thought she deserved consolation; and the two ‘lady contestants’ left the stage arm-in-arm.”—Pall Mall Gazette, April 7, 1876.IV. In last Fors, though I thought I knew my ‘Old Mortality’ well enough, I carelessly wrote ‘Elspeth,’ for ‘Elizabeth,’ (meaning Bessie Maclure); and the misprint ‘Arannah’ for ‘Araunah’ escaped my eyes three times over. The more grotesque one of ‘changes’ for ‘charges,’ in p. 168, line 25, was I suppose appointed by Fors to chastise me for incurable flirtation. I wish I knew who these two schoolgirls are, whom I’ve got to finish my letter to if I can, this time.My dears, will you please, for I can’t rewrite what I’ve said so often, read, when you have opportunity, the letter to a young lady in Fors 34, pp. 29, 30.6Respecting the third article in that letter, I have now a few words to add; (read also, if you can, what is said of the Word of God, in Letters 45 and 46). I told you in last Fors that you would have great difficulty in getting leave from English society to obey Christ. Fors has since sent me, in support of this statement, a paper called ‘The Christian,’—the number for Thursday, May 11,—in the fifteenth page of which is an article on young ladies headed “What can they do?” from which I take the following passage:—“There have been times of special prayer for young men and women. Could there not be also for the very large class of young ladies who do not go out into society? They have no home duties to detain them, as many in a humbler condition; they have hours and hours of leisure, and know not how to spend them—partly from need of being directed, but more so from the prejudices[200]and hindrances in their way. Their hearts are burning to do something for Christ, but they are not allowed, partly because it is considered ‘improper,’ and for a variety of reasons.“There is a cry on every side for labourers. There are numbers longing to respond; if not wholly to dedicate their lives, at least a portion of their days, to active Christian service, and only a wave of united prayer can throw these objections aside, and free the large band who are so willing.“A bright young Christian came to me this week. She is tired of meetings to which she is constantly taken, but never allowed to work in the inquiry-room at them,—hindered from taking up the least bit of work, till at last she cannot evenaskfor it. Almost to ‘kill time,’ she has taken up a secular corresponding agency.”Now that it is ‘considered improper’ by the world that you should do anything for Christ, is entirely true, and always true; and therefore it was that your Godfathers and Godmothers, in your name, renounced the “vain pomp and glory of the world,” with all covetous desires of the same—see baptismal service—(I wonder if you had pretty names—won’t you tell me?) but I much doubt if you, either privately or from the pulpit of your doubtless charming church, have ever been taught what the “vain pomp and glory of the world” was.Well, do you want to be better dressed than your schoolfellows? Some of them are probably poor, and cannot afford to dress like you; or, on the other hand, you may be poor yourselves, and may be mortified at their being dressed better than you. Putanend to all that at once, by resolving to go down into the deep of your girl’s heart, where you will find, inlaid by Christ’s own hand, a better thing than vanity; pity. And be sure of this, that, although in a truly Christian land, every young girl would be dressed beautifully and delightfully,—in this entirely heathen and Baal-worshipping land of ours, not one girl in ten has either decent or healthy clothing, and that you have no[201]business now to wear anything fine yourself, but are bound to use your full strength and resources to dress as many of your poor neighbours as you can. What of fine dress your people insist upon your wearing, take—and wear proudly and prettily, for their sakes; but, so far as in you lies, be sure that every day you are labouring to clothe some poorer creatures. And if you cannot clothe, at least help, with your hands. You can make your own bed; wash your own plate; brighten your own furniture,—if nothing else.‘But that’s servant’s work’? Of course it is. What business have you to hope to be better than a servant of servants? ‘God made you a lady’? Yes, he has put you, that is to say, in a position in which you may learn to speak your own language beautifully; to be accurately acquainted with the elements of other languages; to behave with grace, tact, and sympathy to all around you; to know the history of your country, the commands of its religion, and the duties of its race. If you obey His will in learning these things, you will obtain the power of becoming a true ‘lady;’ and you will become one, if while you learn these things you set yourself, with all the strength of your youth and womanhood, to serve His servants, until the day come when He calls you to say, “Well done, good and faithful servant: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”You may thus become a Christ’s lady, or you may, if you will, become a Belial’s lady, taking Belial’s gift of miserable idleness, living on the labour and shame of others, anddeceivingthem and yourself by lies about Providence, until you perish in hell with the rest of such, shrieking the bitter cry, “When saw weThee?”V.“3, Athole Crescent, Perth,10th May, 1876.“Sir,—Thinking that it may interest you, I take the liberty of writing to let you know that the ‘Lead’ is not at all in the state[202]you suppose it to be; but still runs down, very clear, by the side of the North Inch and past Rose Terrace, and, judging from the numbers of them at this moment playing by it, affords no small delight to the children.“I am, yours most respectfully,“A Reader of ‘Fors.’”VI.“Easthampstead Rectory, Bracknell,“April 20, 1876.“My dear Ruskin,—I have just received this month’s ‘Fors,’ but not read it, (of course not; my friends never do, except to find the mistakes,) as I am off to Dublin, but as regards Psalm lxxxvii., (note, p. 110,) I expounded it in a sermon some time since, and was talking of it to a very learned Hebraist last Monday. Rahab, there, is generally understood to mean ‘the monster,’ and has nothing to do, beyond resemblance of sound, with Rahab the harlot. And the monster is the crocodile, as typical of Egypt. In Psalm lxxxix. 10, (the Bible version, not the Prayer Book,) you will see Rahab explained in the margin, by ‘or Egypt.’“Perhaps Rahab the harlot was called by the same name from the rapacity of her class, just as in Latinlupa.“The whole Psalm is badly translated, and, as we have it, unintelligible. But it is really charged with deep prophetical meaning. I cannot write more, so believe me,“Ever yours affectionately,“O. Gordon.“I hope you will have had a pleasant journey when you receive this. The Greek Septuagint is much better than the English, but not good. As regards the general meaning, you have divined it very correctly.”[203]

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

I. Affairs of the Company.No. 50. G. £10 10s.This is a subscription of five guineas for each year: this amount completes that sum (with the £15 15s.which appeared at p. 65, February Fors) for each of the five years.The publication of the following letter, with its answer, will, I hope, not cause Mr. Tarrant any further displeasure. I have only in the outset to correct his statement that the payment of £10 14s.11d.was onmybehalf. It is simply payment to another lawyer. And my first statement was absolutely accurate; I never said Mr. Tarrant had himself taxed, but that he had been “employed in taxing”; I do not concern myself with more careful analysis, when the accounts are all in print. My accusation is against the ‘legal profession generally,’ not against a firm which I have chosen as an entirely trustworthy one, to be employed both in St. George’s business and my own.2, Bond Court, Walbrook,25th April, 1876.Dear Mr. Ruskin,—I have the April ‘Fors,’ in which I see you have published our account of costs against you, amounting to £47 13s.4d.The document was yours, and you had a perfect right to lay it before your readers, but you are the first client who has ever thought it necessary to put such a document of mine to such a use. I don’t know, however, that it will do me any injury, although the statement preceding it is somewhat inaccurate,[190]because our costs of the transfer of the Sheffield property were £26 15s.11d., which included a payment of £10 14s.11d.made on your behalf, leaving our costs at £16 1s., the other portion of the £47 13s.4d.being costs relating to the constitution of the St. George’s Company, leaving altogether £29 14s.11d.only payable to us beyond money paid on your account. It is hardly fair, therefore, to say that Iemployed myselfin taxing the transfer of the property to nearly £50.As to the charge for letters (the writing of which is really not brickmakers’ work), you must bear in mind that the entire of your matters had to be done by correspondence, for which you are fairly chargeable; and I cannot accuse myself of having written a single letter that was unnecessary.As to the position of the St. George’s Company, it is not a legal company, if by that you mean a company recognized by law: it has neither the advantages nor disadvantages of companies incorporated in accordance with the provisions of the several Acts of Parliament relating to such matters. It is not a legal trust of a charitable nature, if by that term be meant a trust which is liable to the supervision or interference of the Charity Commissioners. It is a number of persons unincorporated, but associated for other purposes than that of gain. It is on a similar footing to such a society as that for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. The Master will be personally responsible for the debts of the Company contracted by his order. If you desire to have a legal-Company, or the supervision of the Charity Commissioners, you must give way in many points which you have hitherto considered indispensable to your scheme. On the 29th February last we sent you a specimen of the form in which we proposed to draw up the memorandum for each Companion to subscribe. If you will return us this with any remarks upon it which may occur to you, we will at once have it engrossed, and send it you to be signed by all the Companions.[191]We were expecting a call from you when you were in town some time since, and should have then have discussed this subject with you, and also the subject of the trust deed which will have to be executed by the Master of the Company.We will act upon your suggestion, and forward the deed of the Sheffield property to Mr. Bagshawe. Shall I also send all the title deeds to him relating to the property? Tell me this.Faithfully yours,W. P. Tarrant.Professor Ruskin,Arthur Severn, Esq., Herne Hill, S.E.(Answer.)Patterdale,6th May, 1876Dear Mr. Tarrant,—I was surprised and vexed by the opening of your letter of 25th April, showing that you had not in the least hitherto understood the scope or meaning of my present work. There is not the smallest unfriendliness in my publication of your account. No client ever had occasion to do it before, of course;—you never had a client before engaged in steady and lifelong contest with the existing principles of the Law, the Church, and the Army,—had you? The publication of your accounts of course can do you no harm, if they are fair; nor have, or had I, the slightest idea of their being otherwise. All accounts for St. George are to be printed: the senders-in must look to the consequences.The delay in my returning your draft of the rules of Company is because every lawyer I speak to tells me of a new difficulty. The whole piece of business, you remember, arose from my request to you simply to secure a piece of ground to our trustees, which had been given us by Mr. Baker. Now I find at the last moment that neither Mr. Baker nor anybody else cangiveus a piece of land at all, but must sell it us.Next, I want to know if this form, as you have drawn it up,[192]is approved by me, what are you going to do with it? What is the good of it? Will the writing of it in black letter make us a legal company, like a railway company, capable of holding land? Do the Charity Commissioners interfere withtheirbusiness? or must we blow some people to bits or smash them into jelly, to prove our want of charity,—and get leave, therefore, to do what we like with our own?Fix your minds, and Mr. Barber’s, on this one point—the grip of the land. If you can’t give us that, send us in your accounts, and let us be done with the matter. If you can, on the document as it stands, write it out on the rubbish your modern stationers call parchment, and do what you will with it, so.I am really ashamed to give any farther account, just now, of the delays in our land work, or of little crosses and worries blocking my first attempt at practice. One of the men whom I thought I had ready for this Worcestershire land, being ordered, for trial, to do a little bit of rough work in Yorkshire that I might not torment Mr. Baker with his freshmanship, threw up the task at once, writing me a long letter of which one sentence was enough for me,—that “he would dohis share, but no more.” These infernal notions of Equality and Independence are so rooted, now, even in the best men’s minds, that they don’t so much as know even what Obedience or Fellowship mean! Fancy one of Nelson’s or Lord Cochrane’s men retreating from his gun, with the avowed resolution to ‘do no more than his share’! However, I know there’s good in this man, and I doubt not he will repent, and break down no more; but I shall not try him again for a year. And I must be forgiven my St. George’s accounts this month. I really can’t let the orchises and hyacinths go out of flower while I’m trying to cast sums; and I’ve been two whole days at work on the[193]purple marsh orchis alone, which my botanical readers will please observe is in St. George’s schools to be called ‘Porphyria veris,’ ‘Spring Purplet.’ It is, I believe, Ophelia’s “long purple.” There are a quantity of new names to be invented for the whole tribe, their present ones being not by St. George endurable.The subjoined letter gives me great pleasure: it is from a son of my earliest Oxford friend: who, as his father helped me in educating myself, is now helping me in the education of others. I print it entire; it may give some of my readers an idea of the minor hindrances which meet one at every step, and take as much time to conquer as large ones. The work to be done is to place a series of the simple chemical elements as ‘Imps’ in a pretty row of poetical Bottles at Sheffield.“Broad Street, Oxford,March 30, 1876.“My dear Mr. Ruskin,—I knocked in vain at your ‘oak’ last night when I came to Corpus to report progress, and also to ask you two questions, which must be put to you by letter, as there is not much time to lose if you wish to have the alkaline earths ready by the time you go to Sheffield. Firstly, do you wish me to see about getting themetalsof the alkalies, and if so which of them do you want? Some of them are extremely expensive,—calcium, for instance, being 2d.a grain; but then, as it is very light a very small quantity would be required as a specimen. The other questions were about the amount of the oxides, and about the shape of the bottles to hold them. I have in your absence chosen some long sample bottles which are very beautiful of their kind, and even if they do not meet your approval they can easily be changed when you return to Oxford. I am progressing fairly well with the earths—Magnesia is ready; Alumina and Baryta partly made, but not yet pure, for it is not more easy in chemistry to get a perfect thing than in any other matter with which man has anything to do, and to-day I have been extremely unfortunate[194]with the Baryta, having tried two methods of making it, broken four crucibles, and, worst of all, failed to make it in a state of purity: however I shall have one more try to-morrow, and no doubt shall succeed. If there is any chance of your being in Oxford before Easter, I will not make the Silica, since the process is very beautiful, and one which no doubt you would like to see. Please excuse the length of my letter, and believe me,“Affectionately yours,“Theodore D. Acland.”II. Affairs of the Master.I am aghast at the columnar aspect of any account given in satisfactory detail; and will only gradually, as I have space, illustrate my own expenditure and its course. That unexplained hundred of last month, diminished itself, I find, thus:£s.d.Pocket1000Klein, (final account on dismissal to Rotterdam, paying his passage, and a shilling or two over)3000Downs, for my London quarterly pensioners2500Morley, (Oxford bookbinding)316Easter presents5007316Leaving a balance of26186to be added to the £200 of personal expenses in this month’s accounts. About a hundred and twenty of this has gone in a fortnight’s posting, with Mr. and Mrs. Severn, from London to Coniston, stopping to see St. Albans, Peterborough, Croyland, Stamford and Burleigh, Grantham, Newark, Lincoln, our new ground at Sheffield, Pomfret, Knaresborough, Ripon, Fountain’s, Richmond, Mortham Tower, and Brougham Castle. A pleasant life, you think? Yes,—if I led an unpleasant one, however dutiful, I could not write any of my books, least of all, Fors. But I am glad, if you honestly think it a pleasant life;why, if[195]so, my richer readers, do you drive only round the parks, every day, instead of from place to place through England, learning a thing or two on the road? Of the rest of the ‘self’ money, I leave further account till next month: it is not all gone yet. I give, however, for a typical example, one of Downs’s weekly bills, reaching the symmetrical total of £7 7s.7d., or a guinea and a penny a day, which I think is about the average. Of the persons named therein as receiving weekly wage, Hersey is our old under-gardener, now rheumatic, and as little able to earn his dinner as I am myself; Rusch, my old lapidary, who cuts in the course of the week what pebbles he can for me; Best, an old coachman, who used to come to us from livery-stable on occasion, and now can’t drive any more; Christy, an old woman who used to work for my mother.1876.£s.d.April22.Cash in hand3012829.Men’s Wages410Coachman’s Book11610Charities0160Sundries0139£777April29.Balance in hand£2351Men’s Wages.£s.d.April29.David Downs1150Thomas Hersey150John Rusch110£410Coachman’s Book.£s.d.April29.Plate Powder, 1s.; Oil, 10d.0110Soap and Sand010Wages1140£11610[196]Charities.£s.d.William Best0100Mrs. Christy060£0160Sundries.£s.d.April22.Postage00524.Rail and ’Bus, British Museum010Cord for Boxes, 1s.6d.; Postage, 1s.6½d.030½25.Horse and Cart, Boxes to Station076Carman, 1s.; Booking ditto, 6d.016Postage00126and 28. Postage002½£0139After thus much of miniature illustration, I have only to explain of the broad effects in the account below, that my Oxford secretary, who has £200 a year, does such work for me connected with my Professorship as only a trained scholar could do, leaving me free here to study hyacinths. I wish I could give him the Professorship itself, but must do as I am bid by Oxford. My younger secretary, who has £100 a year, is this year put into office, for St. George’s correspondence; and I must beg my good friends—now, I am thankful to say, gathering a little to St. George’s work,—not to think themselves slighted in being answered by his hand, for mine is weary.1876.£s.d.April16.Balance1511101May1.Half-year’s Stipend of Slade Professorship179001690101464110Balance, May 16th£1225191[197]April20and 30. Self2000020.Downs500022.Photographs (Leucothea and Lippi)165025.Tailor’s Account3360May 1.Oxford Secretary100001.Raffaelle for May and June150015.Burgess5000£464110III.“Hastings,May 15.“My dear Ruskin,—I enclose two extracts, cut from the same day’s paper, which contain so grimly humorous a parallel between the ways in which the ‘Protestant Church’ and ‘the world’ are engaged in ‘obliterating all traces of the Virgin Mary,’ that I thought you might possibly use them in ‘Fors’ or elsewhere.“Yours affectionately,“C. Patmore.”(The following are the two extracts. Before giving them, I must reply to my greatly honoured and loved friend, that both the Bristol destroyers of images and New York destroyers of humanity, are simply—Lost Sheep of the great Catholic Church; account of whom will be required atherhand.)“Iconoclasm at Bristol.—Our Bristol correspondent writes: The removal of the ‘imagery’ from the north porch of Bristol Cathedral has created considerable excitement in the city and in Clifton. As a member of the capitular body who is known to strongly object to the figures was seen near the Cathedral late on Wednesday night, the clerk of the works employed ‘watchers,’ his intention being to refuse admission to other than his own workmen. On Thursday morning he had occasion to leave the works to go to the quarries at Corsham, and while he was absent a gang of men, under the orders of the chapter clerk, entered the gates, and before the clerk of the works, who was telegraphed for, could[198]return, hauled down the four statues andobliterated all traces of the Virgin Mary, doing much damage to other carving in the process of removal. The last has by no means been heard of this affair. The statues cost over £100 each, but the money value of the ‘imagery’ is not considered by the Restoration Committee. Their contention is that, until the work was completed and handed over to the Cathedral body, it belonged to the Restoration Committee; and it is believed that the right of the Chapter to act as they have done will be tested in a court of law. Feeling is so strong against the action of the Dean and Chapter that plenty of money would be forthcoming to prosecute such an inquiry.”—Pall Mall Gazette, April 7, 1876.“One of the latest ‘sensations’ in New York has been a ‘female boxing match,’ aptly described by theNew York Timesas a ‘novel and nonsensical exhibition.’ The combatants—or ‘lady contestants,’ as they are called in the report of the proceedings—were two ballet-girls, of the kind known as ‘variety dancers.’ One, Miss Saunders, wore a white bodice, purple knee-breeches, which she had borrowed from an Ethiopian serenader, red stockings, and shoes. The other, Miss Harland, was attired in blue trunks and white tights. Both appeared nervous, were very pale, tried to blush, and ‘partially succeeded.’ When the fighting began, Miss Harland ‘did not know what to do with her hands.’ Miss Saunders, however, had her fists more at command, and, after some preliminary sparring, succeeded in striking her opponent ‘square in the face.’ Miss Harland, on her side, ‘by a vicious blow from the shoulder,’ managed to disarrange Miss Saunders’s back hair. Both ladies then smiled. In the end Miss Harland lost the match, ‘owing to her confirmed habit of swinging her hands around in the air.’ Miss Saunders was declared the winner, and carried off a prize of 200 dols. and a piece of silver plate; Miss Harland received[199]a ten-dollar bill from an amateur who thought she deserved consolation; and the two ‘lady contestants’ left the stage arm-in-arm.”—Pall Mall Gazette, April 7, 1876.IV. In last Fors, though I thought I knew my ‘Old Mortality’ well enough, I carelessly wrote ‘Elspeth,’ for ‘Elizabeth,’ (meaning Bessie Maclure); and the misprint ‘Arannah’ for ‘Araunah’ escaped my eyes three times over. The more grotesque one of ‘changes’ for ‘charges,’ in p. 168, line 25, was I suppose appointed by Fors to chastise me for incurable flirtation. I wish I knew who these two schoolgirls are, whom I’ve got to finish my letter to if I can, this time.My dears, will you please, for I can’t rewrite what I’ve said so often, read, when you have opportunity, the letter to a young lady in Fors 34, pp. 29, 30.6Respecting the third article in that letter, I have now a few words to add; (read also, if you can, what is said of the Word of God, in Letters 45 and 46). I told you in last Fors that you would have great difficulty in getting leave from English society to obey Christ. Fors has since sent me, in support of this statement, a paper called ‘The Christian,’—the number for Thursday, May 11,—in the fifteenth page of which is an article on young ladies headed “What can they do?” from which I take the following passage:—“There have been times of special prayer for young men and women. Could there not be also for the very large class of young ladies who do not go out into society? They have no home duties to detain them, as many in a humbler condition; they have hours and hours of leisure, and know not how to spend them—partly from need of being directed, but more so from the prejudices[200]and hindrances in their way. Their hearts are burning to do something for Christ, but they are not allowed, partly because it is considered ‘improper,’ and for a variety of reasons.“There is a cry on every side for labourers. There are numbers longing to respond; if not wholly to dedicate their lives, at least a portion of their days, to active Christian service, and only a wave of united prayer can throw these objections aside, and free the large band who are so willing.“A bright young Christian came to me this week. She is tired of meetings to which she is constantly taken, but never allowed to work in the inquiry-room at them,—hindered from taking up the least bit of work, till at last she cannot evenaskfor it. Almost to ‘kill time,’ she has taken up a secular corresponding agency.”Now that it is ‘considered improper’ by the world that you should do anything for Christ, is entirely true, and always true; and therefore it was that your Godfathers and Godmothers, in your name, renounced the “vain pomp and glory of the world,” with all covetous desires of the same—see baptismal service—(I wonder if you had pretty names—won’t you tell me?) but I much doubt if you, either privately or from the pulpit of your doubtless charming church, have ever been taught what the “vain pomp and glory of the world” was.Well, do you want to be better dressed than your schoolfellows? Some of them are probably poor, and cannot afford to dress like you; or, on the other hand, you may be poor yourselves, and may be mortified at their being dressed better than you. Putanend to all that at once, by resolving to go down into the deep of your girl’s heart, where you will find, inlaid by Christ’s own hand, a better thing than vanity; pity. And be sure of this, that, although in a truly Christian land, every young girl would be dressed beautifully and delightfully,—in this entirely heathen and Baal-worshipping land of ours, not one girl in ten has either decent or healthy clothing, and that you have no[201]business now to wear anything fine yourself, but are bound to use your full strength and resources to dress as many of your poor neighbours as you can. What of fine dress your people insist upon your wearing, take—and wear proudly and prettily, for their sakes; but, so far as in you lies, be sure that every day you are labouring to clothe some poorer creatures. And if you cannot clothe, at least help, with your hands. You can make your own bed; wash your own plate; brighten your own furniture,—if nothing else.‘But that’s servant’s work’? Of course it is. What business have you to hope to be better than a servant of servants? ‘God made you a lady’? Yes, he has put you, that is to say, in a position in which you may learn to speak your own language beautifully; to be accurately acquainted with the elements of other languages; to behave with grace, tact, and sympathy to all around you; to know the history of your country, the commands of its religion, and the duties of its race. If you obey His will in learning these things, you will obtain the power of becoming a true ‘lady;’ and you will become one, if while you learn these things you set yourself, with all the strength of your youth and womanhood, to serve His servants, until the day come when He calls you to say, “Well done, good and faithful servant: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”You may thus become a Christ’s lady, or you may, if you will, become a Belial’s lady, taking Belial’s gift of miserable idleness, living on the labour and shame of others, anddeceivingthem and yourself by lies about Providence, until you perish in hell with the rest of such, shrieking the bitter cry, “When saw weThee?”V.“3, Athole Crescent, Perth,10th May, 1876.“Sir,—Thinking that it may interest you, I take the liberty of writing to let you know that the ‘Lead’ is not at all in the state[202]you suppose it to be; but still runs down, very clear, by the side of the North Inch and past Rose Terrace, and, judging from the numbers of them at this moment playing by it, affords no small delight to the children.“I am, yours most respectfully,“A Reader of ‘Fors.’”VI.“Easthampstead Rectory, Bracknell,“April 20, 1876.“My dear Ruskin,—I have just received this month’s ‘Fors,’ but not read it, (of course not; my friends never do, except to find the mistakes,) as I am off to Dublin, but as regards Psalm lxxxvii., (note, p. 110,) I expounded it in a sermon some time since, and was talking of it to a very learned Hebraist last Monday. Rahab, there, is generally understood to mean ‘the monster,’ and has nothing to do, beyond resemblance of sound, with Rahab the harlot. And the monster is the crocodile, as typical of Egypt. In Psalm lxxxix. 10, (the Bible version, not the Prayer Book,) you will see Rahab explained in the margin, by ‘or Egypt.’“Perhaps Rahab the harlot was called by the same name from the rapacity of her class, just as in Latinlupa.“The whole Psalm is badly translated, and, as we have it, unintelligible. But it is really charged with deep prophetical meaning. I cannot write more, so believe me,“Ever yours affectionately,“O. Gordon.“I hope you will have had a pleasant journey when you receive this. The Greek Septuagint is much better than the English, but not good. As regards the general meaning, you have divined it very correctly.”[203]

I. Affairs of the Company.

No. 50. G. £10 10s.This is a subscription of five guineas for each year: this amount completes that sum (with the £15 15s.which appeared at p. 65, February Fors) for each of the five years.

No. 50. G. £10 10s.

This is a subscription of five guineas for each year: this amount completes that sum (with the £15 15s.which appeared at p. 65, February Fors) for each of the five years.

The publication of the following letter, with its answer, will, I hope, not cause Mr. Tarrant any further displeasure. I have only in the outset to correct his statement that the payment of £10 14s.11d.was onmybehalf. It is simply payment to another lawyer. And my first statement was absolutely accurate; I never said Mr. Tarrant had himself taxed, but that he had been “employed in taxing”; I do not concern myself with more careful analysis, when the accounts are all in print. My accusation is against the ‘legal profession generally,’ not against a firm which I have chosen as an entirely trustworthy one, to be employed both in St. George’s business and my own.

2, Bond Court, Walbrook,25th April, 1876.Dear Mr. Ruskin,—I have the April ‘Fors,’ in which I see you have published our account of costs against you, amounting to £47 13s.4d.The document was yours, and you had a perfect right to lay it before your readers, but you are the first client who has ever thought it necessary to put such a document of mine to such a use. I don’t know, however, that it will do me any injury, although the statement preceding it is somewhat inaccurate,[190]because our costs of the transfer of the Sheffield property were £26 15s.11d., which included a payment of £10 14s.11d.made on your behalf, leaving our costs at £16 1s., the other portion of the £47 13s.4d.being costs relating to the constitution of the St. George’s Company, leaving altogether £29 14s.11d.only payable to us beyond money paid on your account. It is hardly fair, therefore, to say that Iemployed myselfin taxing the transfer of the property to nearly £50.As to the charge for letters (the writing of which is really not brickmakers’ work), you must bear in mind that the entire of your matters had to be done by correspondence, for which you are fairly chargeable; and I cannot accuse myself of having written a single letter that was unnecessary.As to the position of the St. George’s Company, it is not a legal company, if by that you mean a company recognized by law: it has neither the advantages nor disadvantages of companies incorporated in accordance with the provisions of the several Acts of Parliament relating to such matters. It is not a legal trust of a charitable nature, if by that term be meant a trust which is liable to the supervision or interference of the Charity Commissioners. It is a number of persons unincorporated, but associated for other purposes than that of gain. It is on a similar footing to such a society as that for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. The Master will be personally responsible for the debts of the Company contracted by his order. If you desire to have a legal-Company, or the supervision of the Charity Commissioners, you must give way in many points which you have hitherto considered indispensable to your scheme. On the 29th February last we sent you a specimen of the form in which we proposed to draw up the memorandum for each Companion to subscribe. If you will return us this with any remarks upon it which may occur to you, we will at once have it engrossed, and send it you to be signed by all the Companions.[191]We were expecting a call from you when you were in town some time since, and should have then have discussed this subject with you, and also the subject of the trust deed which will have to be executed by the Master of the Company.We will act upon your suggestion, and forward the deed of the Sheffield property to Mr. Bagshawe. Shall I also send all the title deeds to him relating to the property? Tell me this.Faithfully yours,W. P. Tarrant.Professor Ruskin,Arthur Severn, Esq., Herne Hill, S.E.

2, Bond Court, Walbrook,25th April, 1876.

Dear Mr. Ruskin,—I have the April ‘Fors,’ in which I see you have published our account of costs against you, amounting to £47 13s.4d.The document was yours, and you had a perfect right to lay it before your readers, but you are the first client who has ever thought it necessary to put such a document of mine to such a use. I don’t know, however, that it will do me any injury, although the statement preceding it is somewhat inaccurate,[190]because our costs of the transfer of the Sheffield property were £26 15s.11d., which included a payment of £10 14s.11d.made on your behalf, leaving our costs at £16 1s., the other portion of the £47 13s.4d.being costs relating to the constitution of the St. George’s Company, leaving altogether £29 14s.11d.only payable to us beyond money paid on your account. It is hardly fair, therefore, to say that Iemployed myselfin taxing the transfer of the property to nearly £50.

As to the charge for letters (the writing of which is really not brickmakers’ work), you must bear in mind that the entire of your matters had to be done by correspondence, for which you are fairly chargeable; and I cannot accuse myself of having written a single letter that was unnecessary.

As to the position of the St. George’s Company, it is not a legal company, if by that you mean a company recognized by law: it has neither the advantages nor disadvantages of companies incorporated in accordance with the provisions of the several Acts of Parliament relating to such matters. It is not a legal trust of a charitable nature, if by that term be meant a trust which is liable to the supervision or interference of the Charity Commissioners. It is a number of persons unincorporated, but associated for other purposes than that of gain. It is on a similar footing to such a society as that for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. The Master will be personally responsible for the debts of the Company contracted by his order. If you desire to have a legal-Company, or the supervision of the Charity Commissioners, you must give way in many points which you have hitherto considered indispensable to your scheme. On the 29th February last we sent you a specimen of the form in which we proposed to draw up the memorandum for each Companion to subscribe. If you will return us this with any remarks upon it which may occur to you, we will at once have it engrossed, and send it you to be signed by all the Companions.[191]

We were expecting a call from you when you were in town some time since, and should have then have discussed this subject with you, and also the subject of the trust deed which will have to be executed by the Master of the Company.

We will act upon your suggestion, and forward the deed of the Sheffield property to Mr. Bagshawe. Shall I also send all the title deeds to him relating to the property? Tell me this.

Faithfully yours,W. P. Tarrant.

Professor Ruskin,Arthur Severn, Esq., Herne Hill, S.E.

(Answer.)

Patterdale,6th May, 1876Dear Mr. Tarrant,—I was surprised and vexed by the opening of your letter of 25th April, showing that you had not in the least hitherto understood the scope or meaning of my present work. There is not the smallest unfriendliness in my publication of your account. No client ever had occasion to do it before, of course;—you never had a client before engaged in steady and lifelong contest with the existing principles of the Law, the Church, and the Army,—had you? The publication of your accounts of course can do you no harm, if they are fair; nor have, or had I, the slightest idea of their being otherwise. All accounts for St. George are to be printed: the senders-in must look to the consequences.The delay in my returning your draft of the rules of Company is because every lawyer I speak to tells me of a new difficulty. The whole piece of business, you remember, arose from my request to you simply to secure a piece of ground to our trustees, which had been given us by Mr. Baker. Now I find at the last moment that neither Mr. Baker nor anybody else cangiveus a piece of land at all, but must sell it us.Next, I want to know if this form, as you have drawn it up,[192]is approved by me, what are you going to do with it? What is the good of it? Will the writing of it in black letter make us a legal company, like a railway company, capable of holding land? Do the Charity Commissioners interfere withtheirbusiness? or must we blow some people to bits or smash them into jelly, to prove our want of charity,—and get leave, therefore, to do what we like with our own?Fix your minds, and Mr. Barber’s, on this one point—the grip of the land. If you can’t give us that, send us in your accounts, and let us be done with the matter. If you can, on the document as it stands, write it out on the rubbish your modern stationers call parchment, and do what you will with it, so.

Patterdale,6th May, 1876

Dear Mr. Tarrant,—I was surprised and vexed by the opening of your letter of 25th April, showing that you had not in the least hitherto understood the scope or meaning of my present work. There is not the smallest unfriendliness in my publication of your account. No client ever had occasion to do it before, of course;—you never had a client before engaged in steady and lifelong contest with the existing principles of the Law, the Church, and the Army,—had you? The publication of your accounts of course can do you no harm, if they are fair; nor have, or had I, the slightest idea of their being otherwise. All accounts for St. George are to be printed: the senders-in must look to the consequences.

The delay in my returning your draft of the rules of Company is because every lawyer I speak to tells me of a new difficulty. The whole piece of business, you remember, arose from my request to you simply to secure a piece of ground to our trustees, which had been given us by Mr. Baker. Now I find at the last moment that neither Mr. Baker nor anybody else cangiveus a piece of land at all, but must sell it us.

Next, I want to know if this form, as you have drawn it up,[192]is approved by me, what are you going to do with it? What is the good of it? Will the writing of it in black letter make us a legal company, like a railway company, capable of holding land? Do the Charity Commissioners interfere withtheirbusiness? or must we blow some people to bits or smash them into jelly, to prove our want of charity,—and get leave, therefore, to do what we like with our own?

Fix your minds, and Mr. Barber’s, on this one point—the grip of the land. If you can’t give us that, send us in your accounts, and let us be done with the matter. If you can, on the document as it stands, write it out on the rubbish your modern stationers call parchment, and do what you will with it, so.

I am really ashamed to give any farther account, just now, of the delays in our land work, or of little crosses and worries blocking my first attempt at practice. One of the men whom I thought I had ready for this Worcestershire land, being ordered, for trial, to do a little bit of rough work in Yorkshire that I might not torment Mr. Baker with his freshmanship, threw up the task at once, writing me a long letter of which one sentence was enough for me,—that “he would dohis share, but no more.” These infernal notions of Equality and Independence are so rooted, now, even in the best men’s minds, that they don’t so much as know even what Obedience or Fellowship mean! Fancy one of Nelson’s or Lord Cochrane’s men retreating from his gun, with the avowed resolution to ‘do no more than his share’! However, I know there’s good in this man, and I doubt not he will repent, and break down no more; but I shall not try him again for a year. And I must be forgiven my St. George’s accounts this month. I really can’t let the orchises and hyacinths go out of flower while I’m trying to cast sums; and I’ve been two whole days at work on the[193]purple marsh orchis alone, which my botanical readers will please observe is in St. George’s schools to be called ‘Porphyria veris,’ ‘Spring Purplet.’ It is, I believe, Ophelia’s “long purple.” There are a quantity of new names to be invented for the whole tribe, their present ones being not by St. George endurable.

The subjoined letter gives me great pleasure: it is from a son of my earliest Oxford friend: who, as his father helped me in educating myself, is now helping me in the education of others. I print it entire; it may give some of my readers an idea of the minor hindrances which meet one at every step, and take as much time to conquer as large ones. The work to be done is to place a series of the simple chemical elements as ‘Imps’ in a pretty row of poetical Bottles at Sheffield.

“Broad Street, Oxford,March 30, 1876.“My dear Mr. Ruskin,—I knocked in vain at your ‘oak’ last night when I came to Corpus to report progress, and also to ask you two questions, which must be put to you by letter, as there is not much time to lose if you wish to have the alkaline earths ready by the time you go to Sheffield. Firstly, do you wish me to see about getting themetalsof the alkalies, and if so which of them do you want? Some of them are extremely expensive,—calcium, for instance, being 2d.a grain; but then, as it is very light a very small quantity would be required as a specimen. The other questions were about the amount of the oxides, and about the shape of the bottles to hold them. I have in your absence chosen some long sample bottles which are very beautiful of their kind, and even if they do not meet your approval they can easily be changed when you return to Oxford. I am progressing fairly well with the earths—Magnesia is ready; Alumina and Baryta partly made, but not yet pure, for it is not more easy in chemistry to get a perfect thing than in any other matter with which man has anything to do, and to-day I have been extremely unfortunate[194]with the Baryta, having tried two methods of making it, broken four crucibles, and, worst of all, failed to make it in a state of purity: however I shall have one more try to-morrow, and no doubt shall succeed. If there is any chance of your being in Oxford before Easter, I will not make the Silica, since the process is very beautiful, and one which no doubt you would like to see. Please excuse the length of my letter, and believe me,“Affectionately yours,“Theodore D. Acland.”

“Broad Street, Oxford,March 30, 1876.

“My dear Mr. Ruskin,—I knocked in vain at your ‘oak’ last night when I came to Corpus to report progress, and also to ask you two questions, which must be put to you by letter, as there is not much time to lose if you wish to have the alkaline earths ready by the time you go to Sheffield. Firstly, do you wish me to see about getting themetalsof the alkalies, and if so which of them do you want? Some of them are extremely expensive,—calcium, for instance, being 2d.a grain; but then, as it is very light a very small quantity would be required as a specimen. The other questions were about the amount of the oxides, and about the shape of the bottles to hold them. I have in your absence chosen some long sample bottles which are very beautiful of their kind, and even if they do not meet your approval they can easily be changed when you return to Oxford. I am progressing fairly well with the earths—Magnesia is ready; Alumina and Baryta partly made, but not yet pure, for it is not more easy in chemistry to get a perfect thing than in any other matter with which man has anything to do, and to-day I have been extremely unfortunate[194]with the Baryta, having tried two methods of making it, broken four crucibles, and, worst of all, failed to make it in a state of purity: however I shall have one more try to-morrow, and no doubt shall succeed. If there is any chance of your being in Oxford before Easter, I will not make the Silica, since the process is very beautiful, and one which no doubt you would like to see. Please excuse the length of my letter, and believe me,

“Affectionately yours,“Theodore D. Acland.”

II. Affairs of the Master.

I am aghast at the columnar aspect of any account given in satisfactory detail; and will only gradually, as I have space, illustrate my own expenditure and its course. That unexplained hundred of last month, diminished itself, I find, thus:

£s.d.Pocket1000Klein, (final account on dismissal to Rotterdam, paying his passage, and a shilling or two over)3000Downs, for my London quarterly pensioners2500Morley, (Oxford bookbinding)316Easter presents5007316Leaving a balance of26186

to be added to the £200 of personal expenses in this month’s accounts. About a hundred and twenty of this has gone in a fortnight’s posting, with Mr. and Mrs. Severn, from London to Coniston, stopping to see St. Albans, Peterborough, Croyland, Stamford and Burleigh, Grantham, Newark, Lincoln, our new ground at Sheffield, Pomfret, Knaresborough, Ripon, Fountain’s, Richmond, Mortham Tower, and Brougham Castle. A pleasant life, you think? Yes,—if I led an unpleasant one, however dutiful, I could not write any of my books, least of all, Fors. But I am glad, if you honestly think it a pleasant life;why, if[195]so, my richer readers, do you drive only round the parks, every day, instead of from place to place through England, learning a thing or two on the road? Of the rest of the ‘self’ money, I leave further account till next month: it is not all gone yet. I give, however, for a typical example, one of Downs’s weekly bills, reaching the symmetrical total of £7 7s.7d., or a guinea and a penny a day, which I think is about the average. Of the persons named therein as receiving weekly wage, Hersey is our old under-gardener, now rheumatic, and as little able to earn his dinner as I am myself; Rusch, my old lapidary, who cuts in the course of the week what pebbles he can for me; Best, an old coachman, who used to come to us from livery-stable on occasion, and now can’t drive any more; Christy, an old woman who used to work for my mother.

1876.£s.d.April22.Cash in hand3012829.Men’s Wages410Coachman’s Book11610Charities0160Sundries0139£777April29.Balance in hand£2351Men’s Wages.£s.d.April29.David Downs1150Thomas Hersey150John Rusch110£410Coachman’s Book.£s.d.April29.Plate Powder, 1s.; Oil, 10d.0110Soap and Sand010Wages1140£11610[196]Charities.£s.d.William Best0100Mrs. Christy060£0160Sundries.£s.d.April22.Postage00524.Rail and ’Bus, British Museum010Cord for Boxes, 1s.6d.; Postage, 1s.6½d.030½25.Horse and Cart, Boxes to Station076Carman, 1s.; Booking ditto, 6d.016Postage00126and 28. Postage002½£0139

After thus much of miniature illustration, I have only to explain of the broad effects in the account below, that my Oxford secretary, who has £200 a year, does such work for me connected with my Professorship as only a trained scholar could do, leaving me free here to study hyacinths. I wish I could give him the Professorship itself, but must do as I am bid by Oxford. My younger secretary, who has £100 a year, is this year put into office, for St. George’s correspondence; and I must beg my good friends—now, I am thankful to say, gathering a little to St. George’s work,—not to think themselves slighted in being answered by his hand, for mine is weary.

1876.£s.d.April16.Balance1511101May1.Half-year’s Stipend of Slade Professorship179001690101464110Balance, May 16th£1225191[197]April20and 30. Self2000020.Downs500022.Photographs (Leucothea and Lippi)165025.Tailor’s Account3360May 1.Oxford Secretary100001.Raffaelle for May and June150015.Burgess5000£464110

III.

“Hastings,May 15.“My dear Ruskin,—I enclose two extracts, cut from the same day’s paper, which contain so grimly humorous a parallel between the ways in which the ‘Protestant Church’ and ‘the world’ are engaged in ‘obliterating all traces of the Virgin Mary,’ that I thought you might possibly use them in ‘Fors’ or elsewhere.“Yours affectionately,“C. Patmore.”

“Hastings,May 15.

“My dear Ruskin,—I enclose two extracts, cut from the same day’s paper, which contain so grimly humorous a parallel between the ways in which the ‘Protestant Church’ and ‘the world’ are engaged in ‘obliterating all traces of the Virgin Mary,’ that I thought you might possibly use them in ‘Fors’ or elsewhere.

“Yours affectionately,“C. Patmore.”

(The following are the two extracts. Before giving them, I must reply to my greatly honoured and loved friend, that both the Bristol destroyers of images and New York destroyers of humanity, are simply—Lost Sheep of the great Catholic Church; account of whom will be required atherhand.)

“Iconoclasm at Bristol.—Our Bristol correspondent writes: The removal of the ‘imagery’ from the north porch of Bristol Cathedral has created considerable excitement in the city and in Clifton. As a member of the capitular body who is known to strongly object to the figures was seen near the Cathedral late on Wednesday night, the clerk of the works employed ‘watchers,’ his intention being to refuse admission to other than his own workmen. On Thursday morning he had occasion to leave the works to go to the quarries at Corsham, and while he was absent a gang of men, under the orders of the chapter clerk, entered the gates, and before the clerk of the works, who was telegraphed for, could[198]return, hauled down the four statues andobliterated all traces of the Virgin Mary, doing much damage to other carving in the process of removal. The last has by no means been heard of this affair. The statues cost over £100 each, but the money value of the ‘imagery’ is not considered by the Restoration Committee. Their contention is that, until the work was completed and handed over to the Cathedral body, it belonged to the Restoration Committee; and it is believed that the right of the Chapter to act as they have done will be tested in a court of law. Feeling is so strong against the action of the Dean and Chapter that plenty of money would be forthcoming to prosecute such an inquiry.”—Pall Mall Gazette, April 7, 1876.

“Iconoclasm at Bristol.—Our Bristol correspondent writes: The removal of the ‘imagery’ from the north porch of Bristol Cathedral has created considerable excitement in the city and in Clifton. As a member of the capitular body who is known to strongly object to the figures was seen near the Cathedral late on Wednesday night, the clerk of the works employed ‘watchers,’ his intention being to refuse admission to other than his own workmen. On Thursday morning he had occasion to leave the works to go to the quarries at Corsham, and while he was absent a gang of men, under the orders of the chapter clerk, entered the gates, and before the clerk of the works, who was telegraphed for, could[198]return, hauled down the four statues andobliterated all traces of the Virgin Mary, doing much damage to other carving in the process of removal. The last has by no means been heard of this affair. The statues cost over £100 each, but the money value of the ‘imagery’ is not considered by the Restoration Committee. Their contention is that, until the work was completed and handed over to the Cathedral body, it belonged to the Restoration Committee; and it is believed that the right of the Chapter to act as they have done will be tested in a court of law. Feeling is so strong against the action of the Dean and Chapter that plenty of money would be forthcoming to prosecute such an inquiry.”—Pall Mall Gazette, April 7, 1876.

“One of the latest ‘sensations’ in New York has been a ‘female boxing match,’ aptly described by theNew York Timesas a ‘novel and nonsensical exhibition.’ The combatants—or ‘lady contestants,’ as they are called in the report of the proceedings—were two ballet-girls, of the kind known as ‘variety dancers.’ One, Miss Saunders, wore a white bodice, purple knee-breeches, which she had borrowed from an Ethiopian serenader, red stockings, and shoes. The other, Miss Harland, was attired in blue trunks and white tights. Both appeared nervous, were very pale, tried to blush, and ‘partially succeeded.’ When the fighting began, Miss Harland ‘did not know what to do with her hands.’ Miss Saunders, however, had her fists more at command, and, after some preliminary sparring, succeeded in striking her opponent ‘square in the face.’ Miss Harland, on her side, ‘by a vicious blow from the shoulder,’ managed to disarrange Miss Saunders’s back hair. Both ladies then smiled. In the end Miss Harland lost the match, ‘owing to her confirmed habit of swinging her hands around in the air.’ Miss Saunders was declared the winner, and carried off a prize of 200 dols. and a piece of silver plate; Miss Harland received[199]a ten-dollar bill from an amateur who thought she deserved consolation; and the two ‘lady contestants’ left the stage arm-in-arm.”—Pall Mall Gazette, April 7, 1876.

“One of the latest ‘sensations’ in New York has been a ‘female boxing match,’ aptly described by theNew York Timesas a ‘novel and nonsensical exhibition.’ The combatants—or ‘lady contestants,’ as they are called in the report of the proceedings—were two ballet-girls, of the kind known as ‘variety dancers.’ One, Miss Saunders, wore a white bodice, purple knee-breeches, which she had borrowed from an Ethiopian serenader, red stockings, and shoes. The other, Miss Harland, was attired in blue trunks and white tights. Both appeared nervous, were very pale, tried to blush, and ‘partially succeeded.’ When the fighting began, Miss Harland ‘did not know what to do with her hands.’ Miss Saunders, however, had her fists more at command, and, after some preliminary sparring, succeeded in striking her opponent ‘square in the face.’ Miss Harland, on her side, ‘by a vicious blow from the shoulder,’ managed to disarrange Miss Saunders’s back hair. Both ladies then smiled. In the end Miss Harland lost the match, ‘owing to her confirmed habit of swinging her hands around in the air.’ Miss Saunders was declared the winner, and carried off a prize of 200 dols. and a piece of silver plate; Miss Harland received[199]a ten-dollar bill from an amateur who thought she deserved consolation; and the two ‘lady contestants’ left the stage arm-in-arm.”—Pall Mall Gazette, April 7, 1876.

IV. In last Fors, though I thought I knew my ‘Old Mortality’ well enough, I carelessly wrote ‘Elspeth,’ for ‘Elizabeth,’ (meaning Bessie Maclure); and the misprint ‘Arannah’ for ‘Araunah’ escaped my eyes three times over. The more grotesque one of ‘changes’ for ‘charges,’ in p. 168, line 25, was I suppose appointed by Fors to chastise me for incurable flirtation. I wish I knew who these two schoolgirls are, whom I’ve got to finish my letter to if I can, this time.

My dears, will you please, for I can’t rewrite what I’ve said so often, read, when you have opportunity, the letter to a young lady in Fors 34, pp. 29, 30.6Respecting the third article in that letter, I have now a few words to add; (read also, if you can, what is said of the Word of God, in Letters 45 and 46). I told you in last Fors that you would have great difficulty in getting leave from English society to obey Christ. Fors has since sent me, in support of this statement, a paper called ‘The Christian,’—the number for Thursday, May 11,—in the fifteenth page of which is an article on young ladies headed “What can they do?” from which I take the following passage:—

“There have been times of special prayer for young men and women. Could there not be also for the very large class of young ladies who do not go out into society? They have no home duties to detain them, as many in a humbler condition; they have hours and hours of leisure, and know not how to spend them—partly from need of being directed, but more so from the prejudices[200]and hindrances in their way. Their hearts are burning to do something for Christ, but they are not allowed, partly because it is considered ‘improper,’ and for a variety of reasons.

“There is a cry on every side for labourers. There are numbers longing to respond; if not wholly to dedicate their lives, at least a portion of their days, to active Christian service, and only a wave of united prayer can throw these objections aside, and free the large band who are so willing.

“A bright young Christian came to me this week. She is tired of meetings to which she is constantly taken, but never allowed to work in the inquiry-room at them,—hindered from taking up the least bit of work, till at last she cannot evenaskfor it. Almost to ‘kill time,’ she has taken up a secular corresponding agency.”

Now that it is ‘considered improper’ by the world that you should do anything for Christ, is entirely true, and always true; and therefore it was that your Godfathers and Godmothers, in your name, renounced the “vain pomp and glory of the world,” with all covetous desires of the same—see baptismal service—(I wonder if you had pretty names—won’t you tell me?) but I much doubt if you, either privately or from the pulpit of your doubtless charming church, have ever been taught what the “vain pomp and glory of the world” was.

Well, do you want to be better dressed than your schoolfellows? Some of them are probably poor, and cannot afford to dress like you; or, on the other hand, you may be poor yourselves, and may be mortified at their being dressed better than you. Putanend to all that at once, by resolving to go down into the deep of your girl’s heart, where you will find, inlaid by Christ’s own hand, a better thing than vanity; pity. And be sure of this, that, although in a truly Christian land, every young girl would be dressed beautifully and delightfully,—in this entirely heathen and Baal-worshipping land of ours, not one girl in ten has either decent or healthy clothing, and that you have no[201]business now to wear anything fine yourself, but are bound to use your full strength and resources to dress as many of your poor neighbours as you can. What of fine dress your people insist upon your wearing, take—and wear proudly and prettily, for their sakes; but, so far as in you lies, be sure that every day you are labouring to clothe some poorer creatures. And if you cannot clothe, at least help, with your hands. You can make your own bed; wash your own plate; brighten your own furniture,—if nothing else.

‘But that’s servant’s work’? Of course it is. What business have you to hope to be better than a servant of servants? ‘God made you a lady’? Yes, he has put you, that is to say, in a position in which you may learn to speak your own language beautifully; to be accurately acquainted with the elements of other languages; to behave with grace, tact, and sympathy to all around you; to know the history of your country, the commands of its religion, and the duties of its race. If you obey His will in learning these things, you will obtain the power of becoming a true ‘lady;’ and you will become one, if while you learn these things you set yourself, with all the strength of your youth and womanhood, to serve His servants, until the day come when He calls you to say, “Well done, good and faithful servant: enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.”

You may thus become a Christ’s lady, or you may, if you will, become a Belial’s lady, taking Belial’s gift of miserable idleness, living on the labour and shame of others, anddeceivingthem and yourself by lies about Providence, until you perish in hell with the rest of such, shrieking the bitter cry, “When saw weThee?”

V.

“3, Athole Crescent, Perth,10th May, 1876.“Sir,—Thinking that it may interest you, I take the liberty of writing to let you know that the ‘Lead’ is not at all in the state[202]you suppose it to be; but still runs down, very clear, by the side of the North Inch and past Rose Terrace, and, judging from the numbers of them at this moment playing by it, affords no small delight to the children.“I am, yours most respectfully,“A Reader of ‘Fors.’”

“3, Athole Crescent, Perth,10th May, 1876.

“Sir,—Thinking that it may interest you, I take the liberty of writing to let you know that the ‘Lead’ is not at all in the state[202]you suppose it to be; but still runs down, very clear, by the side of the North Inch and past Rose Terrace, and, judging from the numbers of them at this moment playing by it, affords no small delight to the children.

“I am, yours most respectfully,“A Reader of ‘Fors.’”

VI.

“Easthampstead Rectory, Bracknell,“April 20, 1876.“My dear Ruskin,—I have just received this month’s ‘Fors,’ but not read it, (of course not; my friends never do, except to find the mistakes,) as I am off to Dublin, but as regards Psalm lxxxvii., (note, p. 110,) I expounded it in a sermon some time since, and was talking of it to a very learned Hebraist last Monday. Rahab, there, is generally understood to mean ‘the monster,’ and has nothing to do, beyond resemblance of sound, with Rahab the harlot. And the monster is the crocodile, as typical of Egypt. In Psalm lxxxix. 10, (the Bible version, not the Prayer Book,) you will see Rahab explained in the margin, by ‘or Egypt.’“Perhaps Rahab the harlot was called by the same name from the rapacity of her class, just as in Latinlupa.“The whole Psalm is badly translated, and, as we have it, unintelligible. But it is really charged with deep prophetical meaning. I cannot write more, so believe me,“Ever yours affectionately,“O. Gordon.“I hope you will have had a pleasant journey when you receive this. The Greek Septuagint is much better than the English, but not good. As regards the general meaning, you have divined it very correctly.”

“Easthampstead Rectory, Bracknell,“April 20, 1876.

“My dear Ruskin,—I have just received this month’s ‘Fors,’ but not read it, (of course not; my friends never do, except to find the mistakes,) as I am off to Dublin, but as regards Psalm lxxxvii., (note, p. 110,) I expounded it in a sermon some time since, and was talking of it to a very learned Hebraist last Monday. Rahab, there, is generally understood to mean ‘the monster,’ and has nothing to do, beyond resemblance of sound, with Rahab the harlot. And the monster is the crocodile, as typical of Egypt. In Psalm lxxxix. 10, (the Bible version, not the Prayer Book,) you will see Rahab explained in the margin, by ‘or Egypt.’

“Perhaps Rahab the harlot was called by the same name from the rapacity of her class, just as in Latinlupa.

“The whole Psalm is badly translated, and, as we have it, unintelligible. But it is really charged with deep prophetical meaning. I cannot write more, so believe me,

“Ever yours affectionately,“O. Gordon.

“I hope you will have had a pleasant journey when you receive this. The Greek Septuagint is much better than the English, but not good. As regards the general meaning, you have divined it very correctly.”

[203]

1‘Early History of Mankind,’ (a book of rare value and research, however,) p. 379.↑2In the meantime, if any of my readers will look at the leading articles of the ‘Monetary Gazette,’ whose editor I thank with all my heart and soul, for the first honest commercial statements I ever saw in English journals, they will get sufficient light on such matters.↑3Corr., Art. VI.↑4See, on that subject, the third number of Deucalion.↑5Article III. of Correspondence.↑6I should like my lady readers in general to have, of back Fors numbers, at least, 30, 34, 36, 45, 46, and 48: those who have the complete book should scratch out the eleventh line in p. 18 of the last Index, and put the 10th line of it thus: “Ladies, and girls, advice to,30, 2;34, 29;45, 212;48, 271.”↑

1‘Early History of Mankind,’ (a book of rare value and research, however,) p. 379.↑2In the meantime, if any of my readers will look at the leading articles of the ‘Monetary Gazette,’ whose editor I thank with all my heart and soul, for the first honest commercial statements I ever saw in English journals, they will get sufficient light on such matters.↑3Corr., Art. VI.↑4See, on that subject, the third number of Deucalion.↑5Article III. of Correspondence.↑6I should like my lady readers in general to have, of back Fors numbers, at least, 30, 34, 36, 45, 46, and 48: those who have the complete book should scratch out the eleventh line in p. 18 of the last Index, and put the 10th line of it thus: “Ladies, and girls, advice to,30, 2;34, 29;45, 212;48, 271.”↑

1‘Early History of Mankind,’ (a book of rare value and research, however,) p. 379.↑

1‘Early History of Mankind,’ (a book of rare value and research, however,) p. 379.↑

2In the meantime, if any of my readers will look at the leading articles of the ‘Monetary Gazette,’ whose editor I thank with all my heart and soul, for the first honest commercial statements I ever saw in English journals, they will get sufficient light on such matters.↑

2In the meantime, if any of my readers will look at the leading articles of the ‘Monetary Gazette,’ whose editor I thank with all my heart and soul, for the first honest commercial statements I ever saw in English journals, they will get sufficient light on such matters.↑

3Corr., Art. VI.↑

3Corr., Art. VI.↑

4See, on that subject, the third number of Deucalion.↑

4See, on that subject, the third number of Deucalion.↑

5Article III. of Correspondence.↑

5Article III. of Correspondence.↑

6I should like my lady readers in general to have, of back Fors numbers, at least, 30, 34, 36, 45, 46, and 48: those who have the complete book should scratch out the eleventh line in p. 18 of the last Index, and put the 10th line of it thus: “Ladies, and girls, advice to,30, 2;34, 29;45, 212;48, 271.”↑

6I should like my lady readers in general to have, of back Fors numbers, at least, 30, 34, 36, 45, 46, and 48: those who have the complete book should scratch out the eleventh line in p. 18 of the last Index, and put the 10th line of it thus: “Ladies, and girls, advice to,30, 2;34, 29;45, 212;48, 271.”↑

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