Ruskin Relics

in this volume, but most of it is filled with a diary of the tour abroad in 1882, and subsequent entries, ve

books. The remainder consists of daily jottings about the weather, always important to one whose chief pleasure was in scenery, with fragmentary hints of his occupations or travels, and still more fragmentary men

ut at meals and at work, on walks and drives, he had usually to put up with my company. He was exceedingly and unfailingly kind, but exacting; it would have needed great self-confidence to be sure of his good opinion. But now that these papers

of "artistic geology," if one may coin a parallel to "artistic anatomy"-the old subject of his "Modern Painters," vol. iv. In the chapter on the Old Road I sai

k and medi?val mythology, always meant mischief to him. So after the visit to C?teaux and the birthplace of St. Bernard, it was good to see him eager for the mountains, and looking out for well-known twists in the limestone strata, and clefts and cascade

ailway. A railway in the valley of the Arve! It meant to him simply the end of all that made the glory and grandeur of this classic ground. But he was partly comforted by the thought that after all it might not be, or, at least, not in his time

age. In his diary that day he began an analysis of the Psalms-he had been taking them for his morning Bible-readings; and I find that at St. Cergues, on the 5th, he had thankfully noted the arrival of a tel

LANC C

skin at Sallench

study he had begun he set to work "to do a little Deucalion," but opened Job instead, at xi. 16, and read on "with comfort" the "glorious natural histo

But next day I "scored" with a careful drawing of the Nant d'Arpenaz, disentangling the contorted beds of limestone; and in the diary is a copy from my sketch, a subject, he said, he had often tried in vain. On the way back to Sallenches we looked at the old H?tel du Mont Blanc at St. Martin, which gives a title to one of the chapters of "Pr?terita," and need not be described here; but he was so taken with it and its memories that he asked whether it was for sale, and really formed a plan of buying it, and coming to live there. The diary gives vario

n "Hortus Inclusus" about seeing Mont Blanc-"a sight which always redeems me to what I am capable of at my poor little best, and to what loves and memories are most precious to me. So I write to you, one of the few true loves left. The snow has fallen fresh on the hills, and it makes me feel that I must soon be seeking shelter at

F THE LAKE

skin at Talloire

ng (making notes of limestone strata) all the way. Divine walk to old spring under Brezon." Then he reproves himself for his annoyance at the "plague-wind" and tiresome letters at Geneva, "for I shall t

ature that had brought him to admire Art in his youth, and I think it is not too much to say that Art was always a secondary thing to him personally. The desire to see Art healthily and nobly practised made him study the life of the craftsman and the craftsman's surroundings, spiritual and material. The material needs of Victorian society pressed upon him "Unto this Last" and "St. George"; the spiritual ne

Affection for animals appealed to Ruskin, and in France one sees much of it. On one of these drives we stopped for lunch out of doors before a wayside inn. To this lunch there came a little dog, two cats, and a pet sheep, and shared our wine, bread, and Savoy sponge-cakes. The sheep at last got to putting its feet on the table, and the landlady rushed out and carried him off in her arms into the house; but Ruskin, I think, would quite as soon have let the creature stay. At Annecy the landlord told me stories of his big St. Bernard dog, how he was defended from other dogs by the cat, and how sometimes they quarrelled, and then the dog had to go and sit

CENIS TUN

skin at Modane,

till he did not see that the black, ragged, dirty weather was caused by the smoke, though he compared it with a London November. The nearer scenery was visible and beautiful. The blue lake, always blue, with a light of its own, and Talloires, with pleasant associations and unspoiled surroundings of most romantic character, charmed him as of old. We drove there the first Sunday; he took me up to Eugène Sue's house and then on to the cascade

e lecture he had promised to give in December. This was the lecture announced as "Crystallography," but delivered as "Cistercian Architecture," about which he said, joking at his own expense, that it would probably have come to much the same thing whatever the title had been. I did not quite see why he should lecture on either; but he declared himself quite well, and as we had dropped crystallography-the chief subject before the tour-for cathedrals and abbeys in Italy, he shut himself up at Pisa, cold and all, to write his lecture. Th

my misdemeanour until I found how his diary-entries ignored it. "The cold's quite gone! Friday in glowing sunshine, Pisa to Turin; Saturday in frigh

"Cashbook": "An entirely divine railway-coupé drive from Aix by the river gorges; one enchantment of golden trees and ruby hills." But it was a splendid day. In

Y TOWN

be got of the lake through snowstorms; and in the night the wind howled through deserted corridors-for the place was once a real monastery-until it became quite uncanny. His bad dreams had gone, but he could not get exercise enough to sleep well. The lecture was variously rewritten, monks and myths chasing one another through his brain, instead of the crystal-cleavages and rock-forms he had set out to study. St. Benedict had been too strong

," he said, ruined by touristry and luxury into a mere suburb of Paris, which was a suburb of hell. So through cold and flooded France he took his way homeward. At Paris, H?tel Meurice was no longer what it had been; the pneumatic clock in his room, with its minute-gun of a tick and a jerk, got on his nerves, and he demanded of the bewildered waiter that it should be stopped.

his finest; and he was able to write in his "Cashbook" on December 3: "Slept well, and hope to be fit for lecture to-morrow; very happy in showing our drawings and complete sense of rest after th