Ruskin Relics

ir he sat in." Something tangible, that brings before us the person, rather than his work, is what we all like; for though successful workers are continually asking us

e fall down and worship them for what, after all, may be only a lucky accide

nd brighter we need not be ashamed of preserving. And among relics I count all the little incidents, the by-play of life, the anecdotes which betray character, so long as they ar

hand, and the hills, when he lifted his eyes, for his help. The other, by the fireside, was the arm chair into which he migrated for those last ten years of patience, no longer with his own books b

khill, pho

STUDY AT

Teufelsdr?ckh, Professor of Things in General. His chair stood on four legs, or even more, like some antique settles of carved oak; very unlike the Swiss milking-stool of the modern specialist. Not that it stood more firmly; good business-folk, whose sons fell under his

ist's trade he definitely advised going to the Royal Academy schools; his drawing school at Oxford was meant for an almost opposite purpose-to show the average amateur that re

re, introduced by Mr. Alfred W. Hunt, R.W.S., the landscape painter. Ruskin asked to see what I had been doing, and I showed him a niggled and panoramic bit of lake-scenery. "Yes, you have been looking at Hunt and Inchbold." I ho

dea what it was all coming to; though there was the satisfaction of looking through the sliding cases between whiles at "Liber Studiorum" plates-rather ugly, some of them, I whispered to myself-and little scraps of Holbein and Burne-Jones, quite delicious, for I had the pre-Raphaelite measles badly just then, in re

als before that facsimile was completed! And when all was done, "That's not the way to draw a foot," said a popu

ether it was merely a knock-in of the balanced colour-masses or the absolute imitation of the little wavy clouds, an eighth of an inch long, left apparently ragged by the mezzo

to me. That was the beginning of many interesting afternoons in Ruskin's rooms, where I read my bit of translation to him, and he compared it with the Greek, revising and Ruskinising the schoolboy exercise. His method of translation was quite new to me. The Greek was not to be so turned into English as to lose its Greek flavour; one should know it for a rendering out of a foreign tongue. The same word in Greek was to be represented by the same word in English. He would have no more "freedom" in this than in anything else. But he came down heavily on all the catchwords and commonplaces dear

of 1875 to finish it. At my earliest visit, two years before, he had no harbour; the boats were exposed to the big waves from the south-west storms, and it was an almost daily task for the gardeners to keep them aground on the shore and to bale them. In '74 he began some harbour-works, which we were set to com

wel, was his intention; just as the drawing school was not to make them artists, but to show them how hard it was. In his own undergraduate days the yokel and the mob were outside the pale of the gownsman's interests. There was condescending charity, of course, and comradeship in sport with the keeper and the groom; but "your real gentleman," said Byron

was supposed to be the only true natural history: Gilbert White wa

s always the insistence on accuracy above all things, and fulness of observation, with care about trifles which I had not dreamed of before, and never expected from him. It was only much later that I understood, from his note-books and sketch-books, what an immense amount of dry, hard work underlay the easy eloquence of his paragraphs. For instance, "Love's Meinie" seems to be a slight performance; but to serve for it he had a vast collection of unstuffed bird-skins, and to get at the secret of flight planned and commissioned from a skilled artificer sets of quill-feathers, enormous

as he was seen at close quarters, not merely through the medium of print-the last of the sages, lingering into an era of specialists. I do not rate him as an infallible authority, neither in taste, nor in

d lost for want of the scratch of a pencil. In trying to recall these bygones one begins to perceive their loss: so little one can save from the wreckag