mind with the sentiment that nothing was more unworthy the character of a man than that his happiness should in the least depend on what he should eat and drink.1

...

To this hour I never indulge in the use of any delicacy but I feel a degree of reproach and alarm for the degradation of the human character. If I spent my halfpence in sweetmeats, every mouthful I swallowed was accompanied with shame and remorse. Whenever vulgar minds begin to shake off the dogmas of the religion in which they have been educated, the progress is quick and immediate to downright infidelity, and nothing but refinement of mind can enable them to distinguish between the pure essence of religion and the gross systems which men have been perpetually connecting it with. Higher salaries for village schoolmasters, high English reading classes, village libraries, if once such high education were to become general, the low delights of the public-house, and other scenes of riot, would be neglected; while industry, order, and cleanliness, and every virtue which taste and independence of mind could recommend, would prevail and flourish. Thus possessed of a virtuous and enlightened populace, with delight I should consider my country at the head of all the nations of the earth, ancient or modern.-From the Life of Robert Burns.2

21. (III.) The following letter is, as I above said, from a valued, and, at present, my most valued,—Companion ;- —a poor person, suffering much and constant pain, confined to her room, and seeing from her window only a piece of brick wall and a little space of sky. The bit about the spider is the most delightful thing to me that has ever yet come of my teaching:

I have told the only two children I have seen this summer, about the bees, and both were deeply interested, almost awe-stricken by the wonderful work. How could they do it without scissors? One, an intelligent boy of six years, is the well-cared-for child of well-to-do parents. He came into my room when I was sorting some of the cut leaves, and I gave him a very cleanly-cut specimen, saying, "What do you think cut this, Willie?" "It was somebody very clever, wasn't it?" he asked. "Very clever indeed," I said. "Then it was Miss Mildred !". his governess. "No, not Miss Mildred," I replied. He stood silent by the side of the bed for a minute, looking intently at the leaf in his hand, and evidently puzzling out some idea of his own; and I waited for it-a child's own thoughts are lovely; then my little visitor turned eagerly to me: "I know, I know who did it it was God."

My second pupil is a girl of twelve years. She was a veritable "little ragamuffin" when-ten months back-we took her, motherless, and most miserably destitute, into our home, in the hope of training her for service; and my sister is persistently labouring-with pleasing success, and disheartening failure-to mould her into an honest woman, while I try to supplement her efforts by giving the child-Harriet-lessons according to Fors. But I regret to say it is only partially done, for I am but a learner myself, and sorely hindered by illness; still the purpose is always in my mind, and I do what I can.

Taking advantage of every trifle that will help to give Harriet a love for innocent out-of-door life, we told her as soon as we could show her some of the cut leaves -of the work of the cutter bees, much to her delight. "And then she forgot all about them," many persons would assert confidently, if they heard this story.

[Ruskin's note on this passage for his proposed Index is: "Eating and drinking, Pleasures of, unworthy of manly character, says the brother of Robert Burns (but wrongly)."]

[The Works of Robert Burns, with an Account of his Life, by James Currie; first published 1800, this letter first appearing in the second edition.]

3

See above, § 8.]

Not so, for some weeks after she told me with great pride that she had two of "the bees' leaves," thinking they were probably only eaten by caterpillars. I asked to see them; and then, how she obtained them. She had found them in a glass of withered flowers sent out of the parlour, and carefully dried them-(she had seen me press leaves); and she added, "all the girls" in her class in the Sunday-school, "did want them." I wondered why the leaves were taken there, until I discovered that she keeps them in her Testament.

So far the possibility; may I now give a proof of the utility of such teaching? When Harriet first came to us, she had an appetite for the horrible that quite frightened me, but it is gradually, I hope, dying out, thanks to the substitution of childlike pleasures. Imagine a child of eleven years coolly asking-as Harriet did a few days after she came "If you please, has anybody been hanged, or anything, this week?" and she added, before I could reply, and looking quite wistfully at a newspaper lying near, "I should love to hear about it, please." I could have cried, for I believe there are many lovable young ladies in this town who are fretting out weary lives, to whom work would be salvation, and who can tell the number of such children all about them, who have not a soul to care how they live, or if they die?

Harriet used to catch and kill flies for pleasure, and would have so treated any living insect she saw; but she now holds bees in great respect, and also, I hope, some other insect workers, for one day she was much pleased to find one of the small spotted spiders, which had during the night spun its web across the fire-grate. She asked me many questions about it (I permit her to do so on principle, at certain times, as a part of her education); she said it was "a shame" to break "such beautiful work," and left it as long as she could; and then (entirely of her own accord) she carefully slipped her dusting brush under web and spider, and so put the "pretty little dear" outside the window, with the gentle remark, "There, now you can make another." Was not this hopeful? This child had lived all her life in one of the low, crowded courts in the centre of the town, and her ignorance of all green life was inconceivable. For instance, to give her a country walk I sent her last March with a parcel to a village near the town, and when she came back-having walked a mile through field-pathsshe said she did not think there were "such a many trees and birds in the world." And on that memorable day she first saw the lambs in the field-within two miles of the house where she was born. Yet she has the purest love for flowers, and goes into very real ecstasies over the commonest weeds and grasses, and is nursing with great pride and affection some roots of daisy, buttercup, and clover which she has brought from the fields, and planted in the little yard at the back of our house; and every new leaf they put forth is wonderful and lovely to her, though of course her ideas of "" gardening are as yet most elementary, and will be for some time, apparently. But it is really helpful to me to see her happiness over it, and also when my friends send me a handful of cut flowers-we have no garden; and the eagerness with which she learns even their names, for it makes me feel more hopeful about the future of our working classes than some of your correspondents.1

The despairing letter from Yorkshire in last Fors-on their incapacity to enjoy wholesome amusements-has prompted me, as I am writing to you, to tell you this as an antidote to the pain that letter must have given you. For if we can do nothing for this generation, cannot we make sure that the next shall be wiser? Have not young ladies a mighty power in their own hands here, if they but use it for good, and especially those who are Sabbath-school teachers? Suppose each one who has a garden felt it to be her duty to make all her scholars as familiar with all the life in it as she is herself, and every one who can take a country walk her duty to take her girls with her-two or three at a time-until they 1 [For "the progress of little Harriet's botanical museum," see Letter 81, § 21 (Vol. XXIX. p. 217).]

2

[Not last Fors, but probably Letters 55, § 9, and 57, § 10 (pp. 380, 409).]

know and love every plant within reach; would not teacher and pupils learn with this much more that would also be invaluable ?* And if our Sunday-school children were not left to killing flies and stoning cats and dogs during the week, would there be so many brutal murders or violent assaults? The little English heathen I have named has attended a Sunday-school for about six years, and the Sundayschool teachers of this town are-most of them-noble men and women, who devoutly labour year after year "all for love, and nothing for reward.” But even good people too often look on the degradation of the lower classes as a matter of course, and despise them for ignorance they cannot help. Here the sneer of "those low shoemakers" is for ever on the lip, yet few ask how they became so much lower than ourselves; still I have very pleasing proof of what may be done even for adults by a little wise guidance, but I must not enter into that subject. Pray forgive me for writing so much: I have been too deeply interested, and now feel quite ashamed of the length of this.

Again thanking you most earnestly for all you have taught me to see and to do, 1 remain, very faithfully yours.

22. (IV.) What the young ladies, old ladies, and middle-aged ladies are practically doing with the blessed fields and mountains of their native land, the next letter very accurately shows. For the sake of fine dresses they let their fathers and brothers invest in any Devil's business they can steal the poor's labour by, or destroy the poor's gardens by; pre-eminently, and of all Devil's businesses, in rushing from place to place, as the Gennesaret swine.2 And see here what comes of it.

A gentleman told me the other night that trade, chiefly in cotton from India, was going back to Venice. One can't help being sorry-not for our sake, but Venice's when one sees what commercial prosperity means now.

3

There was a lovely picture of Cox's of Dollwydellan (I don't think it's spelt right) at the Club. All the artists paint the Slidr valley; and do you know what is being done to it? It's far worse than a railway to Ambleside or Grasmere, because those places are overrun already; but Dollwydellan is such a quiet outof-the-way corner, and no one in the world will be any the better for a railway there. I went about two months ago, when I was getting better from my first illness; but all my pleasure in the place was spoiled by the railway they are making from Bettwys. It is really melancholy to see the havoc it makes. course no one cares, and they crash, and cut, and destroy, like utter barbarians, as they are. Through the sweetest, wildest little glens, the line is cleared-rocks are blasted for it, trees lie cut-anything and everything is sacrificed-and for what? The tourists will see nothing if they go in the train; the few people who go down to Bettwys or Llanwrst to market, will perhaps go oftener, and so spend more money in the end, and Dollwydellan will get some more people to lodge there in the summer, and prices will go up. In the little village, a hideous

Yes, dear lady; see, therefore, the next article.

Of

Yes, my dear, and shares down;-it is some poor comfort for you and me to know that. For as I correct this sheet for press, I hear from the proprietor of the chief slate quarry in the neighbourhood, that the poor idiots of shareholders have been beguiled into tunnelling four miles under Welsh hills-to carry slates! and even those from the chief quarry in question, they cannot carry, for the proprietors are under contract to send them by an existing line.

1 [For a reference by Ruskin to this passage, see Letter 81, § 4 n. (Vol. XXIX. p. 194).]

2 [See Matthew viii. 32.]

See below, p. 511.]

"traction engine" snorted and puffed out clouds of black smoke, in the mornings, and then set off crunching up and down the roads, to carry coals for the works, I think; but I never in my life saw anything more incongruous than that great black monster getting its pipes filled at a little spring in the village, while the lads all stood gaping round. The poor little clergyman told us his village had got sadly corrupted since the navvies came into it; and when he pointed out to us a pretty old stone bridge that was being pulled down for the railway, he said, "Yes, I shall miss that, very much;" but he would not allow that things so orthodox as railways could be bad on the whole. I never intended, when I began, to trouble you with all this, but Cox's picture set me off, and it really is a great wrong that any set of men can take possession of one of the few peaceful spots left in England, and hash it up like that. Fancy driving along the road up the Slidr valleys and seeing on boards a notice, to "beware when the horn was blowing," and every now and then hearing a great blasting, smoke, and rocks crashing down. Well, you know just as well as I how horrible it all is. Only I can't think why people sit still, and let the beautiful places be destroyed.

The owners of that property,-I forget their name, but they had monuments in the little old church,-never live there, having another "place" in Scotland,— so of course they don't care.*

23. (V.) A fragment to illustrate the probable advantage of sulphurous air, and articles, in the country.

"

I did not think to tell you, when speaking of the fatality of broken limbs in our little dressmaker and her family, that when in St. Thomas's Hospital with a broken thigh, the doctors said in all probability the tenderness of her bones was owing to the manufacture of sulphur by her mother's grandfather. Dr. Simon knows her family through operating on the brother of our dressmaker, and often gave them kindly words at the hospital.

I am, dear Sir,
Yours faithfully.

* Will any charitable Christian tell me who the owners are?-in the meantime, "confusion on their banners wait." 2

1 [Ruskin's friend, Sir John Simon, for whom see Vol. XVII. p. 450 n.]

2 ["Ruin seize thee, ruthless king!

Confusion on thy banners wait."

Opening lines of The Bard, by Thomas Gray.]

LETTER 62

DOGS OF THE LORD1

1. THERE were more, and more harmful misprints in last Fors than usual, owing to my having driven my printers to despair, after they had made all the haste they could, by late dubitation concerning the relative ages of Shem, Ham, and Japheth, which forced me to cut out a sentence about them, and displace corrected type. But I must submit to all and sundry such chances of error, for, to prevent them, would involve a complete final reading of the whole, with one's eye and mind on the look-out for letters and stops all along, for which I rarely allow myself time, and which, had I a month to spare, would yet be a piece of work ill spent, in merely catching three t's instead of two in a "lettter." The name of the Welsh valley is wrong, too; 2 but I won't venture on correction of that, which I feel to be hopeless; the reader must, however, be kind enough to transfer the "and," now the sixth word in the upper line of the note at page 509, and make it the fourth word, instead; to put a note of interrogation at the end of clause in the eighteenth line of page 508, and to insert an s, changing "death" into "deaths," in the eleventh line of page 504;-the death in Sheffield being that commended to the Episcopic attention of York, and that in London to the Episcopic attention of London.

And this commendation, the reader will, I hope, perceive to be made in sequel to much former talk concerning

2

1 [See below, § 4. Ruskin in his copy adds "Avarice, Covetousness, Frugality."] [See above, § 22, p. 509; it should be Dolwyddelan. The other corrections here noted by Ruskin are made in the text.]