good, and waste the ground that would grow blessed cherry trees, currant bushes, or wheat, in growing a miserable root as a substitute for the sugar-cane, which God has appointed to grow where cherries and wheat won't, and to give juice which will freeze into sweet snow as pure as hoar-frost.

Now, on the poorest farm of the St. George's Company, the servants shall have white and brown sugar of the best -or none. If we are too poor to buy sugar, we will drink our tea without; and have suet-dumpling instead of pudding. But among the earliest school lessons, and home lessons, decent behaviour at table will be primarily essential; and of such decency, one little exact point will be the neat, patient, and scrupulous use of sugar-tongs instead of fingers. If we are too poor to have silver basins, we will have delf ones; if not silver tongs, we will have wooden ones; and the boys of the house shall be challenged to cut, and fit together, the prettiest and handiest machines of the sort they can contrive. In six months you would find more real art fancy brought out in the wooden handles and claws, than there is now in all the plate in London.

10. Now, there's the cuckoo-clock striking seven, just as I sit down to correct the press of this sheet, in my nursery at Herne Hill; and though I don't remember, as the murderer does in Mr. Crummles' play, having heard a cuckoo-clock strike seven-in my infancy,' I do remember, in my favourite Frank, much talk of the housekeeper's cuckoo-clock, and of the boy's ingenuity in mending it. Yet to this hour of seven in the morning, ninth December of my fifty-fifth year, I haven't the least notion how any such clock says "Cuckoo," nor a clear one even of the making of the commonest barking toy of a child's Noah's ark. I don't know how a barrel-organ produces music by being ground; nor what real function the pea has in a

1 [Nicholas Nickleby, ch. xxiv.]

2 [For another reference to Miss Edgeworth's Frank, see Letter 43, § 5 (p. 112).]

whistle. Physical science-all this-of a kind which would have been boundlessly interesting to me, as to all boys of mellifluous disposition, if only I had been taught it with due immediate practice, and enforcement of true manufacture, or, in pleasant Saxon, "handiwork." But there shall not be on St. George's estate a single thing in the house which the boys don't know how to make, nor a single dish on the table which the girls will not know how to cook.

11. By the way, I have been greatly surprised by receiving some letters of puzzled inquiry as to the meaning of my recipe, given last year, for Yorkshire Pie.1 Do not my readers yet at all understand that the whole gist of this book is to make people build their own houses, provide and cook their own dinners, and enjoy both? Something else besides, perhaps; but at least, and at first, those. St. Michael's mass, and Christ's mass, may eventually be associated in your minds with other things than goose and pudding; but Fors demands at first no more chivalry nor Christianity from you than that you build your houses bravely, and earn your dinners honestly, and enjoy them both, and be content with them both. The contentment is the main matter; you may enjoy to any extent, but if you are discontented, your life will be poisoned. The little pig was so comforting to me because he was wholly content to be a little pig; and Mr. Leslie Stephen is in a certain degree exemplary and comforting to me, because he is wholly content to be Mr. Leslie Stephen; while I am miserable because I am always wanting to be something else than I am. I want to be Turner; I want to be Gainsborough; I want to be Samuel Prout; I want to be

1 [See Letter 25, § 2 (Vol. XXVII. p. 448).]

2

2 [Stephen's biographer, the late Professor F. W. Maitland, in quoting this passage adds: "So wrote Ruskin; but let us distinguish. If the prophet meant that Stephen was self-complacent and satisfied with his own performances, the prophet made a great mistake; but if he meant that Stephen was contented with his lot, that is true and worth saying" (Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, p. 258). Stephen was Ruskin's neighbour for some weeks at Coniston, and they had some friendly intercourse (see Vol. XXIV. p. xxxi., and, in a later volume, Ruskin's letter of August 2, 1876, to C. E. Norton); but Stephen "could not be at ease with him" (Life and Letters, pp. 292, 302, 308).]

Doge of Venice; I want to be Pope; I want to be Lord of the Sun and Moon. The other day, when I read that story in the papers about the dog-fight,* I wanted to be able to fight a bulldog.

12. Truly, that was the only effect of the story upon me, though I heard everybody else screaming out "how horrible it was!" What's horrible in it? Of course it is in bad taste, and the sign of a declining era of national honour-as all brutal gladiatorial exhibitions are; and the stakes and rings of the tethered combat meant precisely, for England, what the stakes and rings of the Theatre of Taormina,-where I saw the holes left for them among the turf, blue with Sicilian lilies, in this last April,—meant, for Greece, and Rome. There might be something loathsome, or something ominous, in such a story, to the old Greeks of the school of Heracles; who used to fight with the Nemean lion, or with Cerberus, when it was needful only, and not for money; and whom their Argus remembered through all Trojan exile.' There might be something loathsome in it, or ominous, to an Englishman of the school of Shakespeare or Scott; who would fight with men only, and loved his hound. But for you—you carnivorous cheats 2 -what, in dog's or devil's name, is there horrible in it for you? Do you suppose it isn't more manly and virtuous to fight a bulldog, than to poison a child, or cheat a fellow

* I don't know how far it turned out to be true,-a fight between a dwarf and a bulldog (both chained to stakes, as in Roman days), described at length in some journals.3

1 [For the recognition of Ulysses by his dog Argus, see Odyssey, xvii. 291 seq.] 2 [See Letter 42, § 14 (p. 102).]

3[The reference is to a sensational account of a fight at Hanley between a bulldog and an undersized man known as "Brummy," contributed by Mr. James Greenwood to the Daily Telegraph of July 6, 1874. The article attracted much attention, and the accuracy of Mr. Greenwood's statements was hotly challenged see various notes and letters in the Times of July and August (and especially the issues of July 21 and August 12). The Home Secretary (then Mr. Cross) was questioned on the matter in Parliament. On July 9 he stated that he had "every reason to believe that the account is substantially true"; on July 23, that the Chief Constable of Hanley, after prolonged inquiries, had been "unable to find any corroboration." Mr. Greenwood, however, maintained positively the accuracy of his account.]

who trusts you, or leave a girl to go wild in the streets? And don't you live, and profess to live-and even insolently proclaim that there's no other way of living thanby poisoning and cheating? And isn't every woman of fashion's dress, in Europe, now set the pattern of to her by its prostitutes?

13. What's horrible in it? I ask you, the third time. I hate, myself, seeing a bulldog ill-treated; for they are the gentlest and faithfullest of living creatures if you use them well. And the best dog I ever had was a bullterrier,' whose whole object in life was to please me, and nothing else; though, if he found he could please me by holding on with his teeth to an inch-thick stick, and being swung round in the air as fast as I could turn, that was his own idea of entirely felicitous existence. I don't like, therefore, hearing of a bulldog's being ill-treated; but I can tell you a little thing that chanced to me at Coniston the other day, more horrible, in the deep elements of it, than all the dog, bulldog, or bull-fights, or baitings, of England, Spain, and California. A fine boy, the son of an amiable English clergyman, had come on the coach-box round the Water-head to see me, and was telling me of the delightful drive he had had. "Oh," he said, in the triumph of his enthusiasm," and just at the corner of the wood, there was such a big squirrel! and the coachman threw a stone at it, and nearly hit it!"

2

"Thoughtlessness-only thoughtlessness" say you proud father? Well, perhaps not much worse than that. But how could it be much worse? Thoughtlessness is precisely the chief public calamity of our day; and when it comes to the pitch, in a clergyman's child, of not thinking 1 [Ruskin was "a devoted lover and keen observer of animals. It would take long to tell the story of all his dogs, from the spaniel Dash, commemorated in his earliest poems, and Wisie, whose sagacity is related in Præterita, down through the long line of bulldogs, St. Bernards, and collies, to Bramble, the reigning favourite; and all the cats who made his study their home, or were flirted with abroad" (W. G. Collingwood, Life and Work of John Ruskin, 1900, p. 355). For one of his dogs, see below, p. 256 n.]

2 [See Preface to the second edition of Ethics of the Dust, where Ruskin refers to this passage: Vol. XVIII. p. 204.]

that a stone hurts what it hits of living things, and not caring for the daintiest, dextrousest, innocentest living thing in the northern forests of God's earth, except as a brown excrescence to be knocked off their branches,-nay, good pastor of Christ's lambs, believe me, your boy had better have been employed in thoughtfully and resolutely stoning St. Stephen-if any St. Stephen is to be found in these days, when men not only can't see heaven opened, but don't so much as care to see it shut.1

For they, at least, meant neither to give pain nor death without cause,-that unanimous company who stopped their ears,—they, ears, they, and the consenting bystander who afterwards was sorry for his mistake.2

14. But, on the whole, the time has now come when we must cease throwing of stones either at saints or squirrels ; and, as I say, build our own houses with them, honestly set and similarly content ourselves in peaceable use of iron and lead, and other such things which we have been in the habit of throwing at each other dangerously, in thoughtlessness; and defending ourselves against as thoughtlessly, though in what we suppose to be an ingenious manner. Ingenious or not, will the fabric of our new ship of the Line, Devastation, think you, follow its fabricator in heavenly places, when he dies in the Lord? * In such representations as I have chanced to see of probable Paradise, Noah is never without his ark;-holding that up for judgment as the main work of his life. Shall we hope at the Advent to see the builder of the Devastation invite St. Michael's judgment on his better style of naval architecture, and four-foot-six-thick "armour of light"?®

[Compare Letter 75, § 14 (Vol. XXIX. p. 70).]

2 Acts vii. 56 seq.]

5

[The Devastation-turret-ship, designed by Sir E. J. Reed (1830-1906), launched in 1871 and commissioned in 1873-was the representative of the newest and most powerful type of battleship at the time. She was the first British sea-going battleship that relied solely on steam. For other references to her, see Letters 64, § 26, and 65,

§ 4 (below, pp. 585, 590).]

4

[Revelation xiv. 13: see above, p. 148.]

5 [As, for instance, in Tintoret's "Paradise" in the Ducal Palace: see the description in Vol. XXII. p. 104.]

[Romans xiii. 12.]