November 28th, 1875.

(In the house of a friend who, being ashamed of me and my words, requests that this Fors may not be dated from it.)

‘Live and learn.’ I trust it may yet be permitted me to fulfil the adage a few years longer, for I find it takes a great deal of living to get a little deal of learning. (Query, meaning of ‘deal’?—substantive of verb deal—as at whist?—no Johnson by me, and shall be sure to forget to look when I have.) But I have learned something this morning,—the use of the holes in the bottom of a fireshovel, to wit. I recollect, now, often and often, seeing my mother sift the cinders; but, alas, she never taught me to do it. Did not think, perhaps, that I should ever have occasion, as a Bishop, to occupy myself in that manner; nor understand,—poor sweet mother,—how advisable it might be to have some sort of holes in my shovel-hat, for sifting cinders of human soul. [2]

Howsoever, I have found out the art, this morning, in the actual ashes; thinking all the time how it was possible for people to live in this weather, who had no cinders to sift. My hostess’s white cat, Lily, woke me at half-past five by piteous mewing at my window; and being let in, and having expressed her thanks by getting between my legs over and over again as I was shaving, has at last curled herself up in my bed, and gone to sleep,—looking as fat as a little pillow, only whiter; but what are the cats to do, to-day, who have no one to let them in at the windows, no beds to curl up into, and nothing but skin and bones to curl?

‘It can’t be helped, you know;—meantime, let Lily enjoy her bed, and be thankful, (if possible, in a more convenient manner). And do you enjoy your fire, and be thankful,’ say the pious public: and subscribe, no doubt, at their Rector’s request, for an early dole of Christmas coals. Alas, my pious public, all this temporary doling and coaling is worse than useless. It drags out some old women’s lives a month or two longer,—makes, here and there, a hearth savoury with smell of dinner, that little knew of such frankincense; but, for true help to the poor, you might as well light a lucifer match to warm their fingers; and for the good to your own hearts,—I tell you solemnly, all your comfort in, such charity is simply, Christ’s dipped sop, given to you for signal to somebody else than Christ, that it is his hour to find the windows of your soul open—to the Night, [3]whence very doleful creatures, of other temper and colour than Lily, are mewing to get in.

Indeed, my pious public, you cannot, at present, by any coal or blanket subscription, do more than blind yourselves to the plain order “Give to him that asketh thee; and from him that would borrow of thee, turn not thou away.”

To him that asketh us, say the public,—but then—everybody would ask us.

Yes, you pitiful public,—pretty nearly everybody would: that is indeed the state of national dignity, and independence, and gushing prosperity, you have brought your England into; a population mostly of beggars, (at heart); or, worse, bagmen, not merely bearing the bag—but nothing else but bags;—sloppy star-fishy, seven-suckered stomachs of indiscriminate covetousness, ready to beg, borrow, gamble, swindle, or write anything a publisher will pay for.

Nevertheless your order is precise, and clear; ‘Give to him that asketh thee’—even to the half of your last cloak—says St. Martin; even to the whole of it, says Christ: ‘whosoever of you forsaketh not all that he hath, cannot be my disciple.’

‘And you yourself, who have a house among the lakes, and rooms at Oxford, and pictures, and books, and a Dives dinner every day, how about all that?’

Yes, you may well ask,—and I answer very distinctly and frankly, that if once I am convinced (and it is [4]not by any means unlikely I should be so) that to put all these things into the hands of others, and live, myself, in a cell at Assisi, or a shepherd’s cottage in Cumberland, would be right, and wise, under the conditions of human life and thought with which I have to deal—very assuredly I will do so.

Nor is it, I repeat, unlikely that such conviction may soon happen to me; for I begin to question very strictly with myself, how it is that St. George’s work does not prosper better in my hands.

Here is the half-decade of years, past, since I began the writing of Fors, as a byework, to quiet my conscience, that I might be happy in what I supposed to be my own proper life of Art-teaching, at Oxford and elsewhere; and, through my own happiness, rightly help others.

But Atropos has ruled it quite otherwise. During these five years, very signal distress has visited me, conclusively removing all possibilities of cheerful action; separating and sealing a great space of former life into one wide field of Machpelah; and leaving the rest sunless. Also, everything I have set hand to has been unprosperous; much of it even calamitous;—disappointment, coupled with heavy money loss, happening in almost every quarter to me, and casting discredit on all I attempt; while, in things partly under the influence and fortune of others, and therefore more or less successful,—the schools at Oxford especially, which owe the greater part of their efficiency to the fostering zeal of Dr. Acland, [5]and the steady teaching of Mr. Macdonald,—I have not been able, for my own share, to accomplish the tenth part of what I planned.

Under which conditions, I proceed in my endeavour to remodel the world, with more zeal, by much, than at the beginning of the year 1871.

For these following reasons.

First, that I would give anything to be quit of the whole business; and therefore that I am certain it is not ambition, nor love of power, nor anything but absolute and mere compassion, that drags me on. That shoemaker, whom his son left lying dead with his head in the fireplace the other day,1—I wish he and his son had never been born;—but as the like of them will be born, and must so die, so long as things remain as they are, there’s no choice for me but to do all I know to change them, since others won’t.

Secondly. I observe that when all things, in early life, appeared to be going well for me, they were by no means going well, in the deep of them, but quite materially and rapidly otherwise. Whence I conclude that though things appear at present adverse to my work and me, they may not at all be adverse in the deep of them, but quite otherwise.

Thirdly. Though in my own fortune, unprosperous, and in my own thoughts and labour, failing, I find more and more every day that I have helped many persons [6]unknown to me; that others, in spite of my failures, begin to understand me, and are ready to follow; and that a certain power is indeed already in my hands, woven widely into the threads of many human lives; which power, if I now laid down, that line (which I have always kept the murmur of in my ears, for warning, since first I read it thirty years ago,)—

would be finally and fatally true of me.

Fourthly, not only is that saying of Bacon’s of great comfort to me, “therefore extreme lovers of their country, or masters, were never fortunate; neither can they be, for when a man placeth his thoughts without himself, he goeth not his own way,”3 for truly I have always loved my masters, Turner, Tintoret, and Carlyle, to the exclusion of my own thoughts; and my country more than my own garden: but also, I do not find in the reading of history that any victory worth having was ever won without cost; and I observe that too open and early prosperity is rarely the way to it.

But lastly, and chiefly. If there be any truth in the vital doctrines of Christianity whatsoever,—and [7]assuredly there is more than most of us recognise, or than any of us believe,—the offences committed in this century by all the nations of Christendom against the law of Christ have been so great, and insolent, that they cannot but be punished by the withdrawal of spiritual guidance from them, and the especial paralysis of efforts intelligently made for their good. In times of more ignorant sinning, they were punished by plagues of the body; but now, by plagues of the soul, and widely infectious insanities, making every true physician of souls helpless, and every false effort triumphant. Nor are we without great and terrible signs of supernatural calamity, no less in grievous changes and deterioration of climate, than in forms of mental disease,4 claiming distinctly to be necromantic, and, as far as I have examined the evidence relating to them, actually manifesting themselves as such. For observe you, my friends, countrymen, and brothers—Either, at this actual moment of your merry Christmas-time, that has truly come to pass, in falling London, which your greatest Englishman wrote of falling Rome, “the sheeted dead, do squeak and gibber in your English streets,”—Or, such a system of loathsome imposture and cretinous [8]blasphemy is current among all classes of England and America, as makes the superstition of all past ages divine truth in comparison!

One of these things is so—gay friends;—have it which way you will: one or other of these, to me, alike appalling; and in your principal street of London society, you have a picture of highly dressed harlots gambling, of naked ones, called Andromeda and Francesca of Rimini, and of Christ led to be crucified, exhibited, for your better entertainment, in the same room; and at the end of the same street, an exhibition of jugglery, professedly imitating, for money, what a large number of you believe to be the efforts of the returned Dead to convince you of your Immortality.

Meantime, at the other end—no, at the very centre of your great Babylon, a son leaves his father dead, with his head, instead of a fire, in the fireplace, and goes out himself to his day’s darg.

‘We are very sorry;—What can we do? How can we help it? London is so big, and living is so very expensive, you know.’

Miserables,—who makes London big, but you, coming to look at the harlotries in it, painted and other? Who makes living expensive, but you, who drink, and eat,5 and dress, all you can; and never in your lives did one stroke of work to get your living,—never [9]drew a bucket of water, never sowed a grain of corn, never spun a yard of thread;—but you devour, and swill, and waste, to your fill, and think yourselves good, and fine, and better creatures of God, I doubt not, than the poor starved wretch of a shoemaker, who shod whom he could, while you gave him food enough to keep him in strength to stitch.

We, of the so-called ‘educated’ classes, who take it upon us to be the better and upper part of the world, cannot possibly understand our relations to the rest better than we may where actual life may be seen in front of its Shakespearean image, from the stalls of a theatre. I never stand up to rest myself, and look round the house, without renewal of wonder how the crowd in the pit, and shilling gallery, allow us of the boxes and stalls to keep our places! Think of it;—those fellows behind there have housed us and fed us; their wives have washed our clothes, and kept us tidy;—they have bought us the best places,—brought us through the cold to them; and there they sit behind us, patiently, seeing and hearing what they may. There they pack themselves, squeezed and distant, behind our chairs;—we, their elect toys and pet puppets, oiled, and varnished, and incensed, lounge in front, placidly, or for the greater part, wearily and sickly contemplative. Here we are again, all of us, this Christmas! Behold the artist in tumbling, and in painting with white and red,—our object of worship, and applause: here sit we [10]at our ease, the dressed dolls of the place, with little more in our heads, most of us, than may be contained inside of a wig of flax and a nose of wax; stuck up by these poor little prentices, clerks, and orange-sucking mobility, Kit, and his mother, and the baby—behind us, in the chief places of this our evening synagogue. What for? ‘They did not stick you up’ say you,—you paid for your stalls with your own money. Where did you get your money? Some of you—if any Reverend gentlemen, as I hope, are among us,—by selling the Gospel; others by selling Justice; others by selling their Blood—(and no man has any right to sell aught of these three things, any more than a woman her body,)—the rest, if not by swindling, by simple taxation of the labour of the shilling gallery,—or of the yet poorer or better persons who have not so much, or will not spend so much, as the shilling to get there? How else should you, or could you, get your money,—simpletons?

Not that it is essentially your fault, poor feathered moths,—any more than the dead shoemaker’s. That blasphemous blockheadism of Mr. Greg’s,6 and the like of him, that you can swill salvation into other people’s bodies out of your own champagne-bottles, is the main root of all your national miseries. Indeed you are willing enough to believe that devil’s-gospel, you rich ones; or [11]most of you would have detected the horror of it before now; but yet the chief wrong lies with the assertors of it,—and once and again I tell you, the words of Christ are true,—and not their’s; and that the day has come for fasting, and prayer, not for feasting; but, above all, for labour—personal and direct labour—on the Earth that bears you, and buries—as best it can.

9th December.—I heard yesterday that the son of the best English portrait-painter we have had since Gainsborough, had learnt farming; that his father had paid two hundred pounds a year to obtain that instruction for him; and that the boy is gone, in high spirits, to farm—in Jamaica! So far, so good. Nature and facts are beginning to assert themselves to the British mind. But very dimly.

For, first, observe, the father should have paid nothing for that boy’s farming education. As soon as he could hold a hoe, the little fellow should have been set to do all he could for his living, under a good farmer for master; and as he became able to do more, taught more, until he knew all that his master knew,—winning, all the while he was receiving that natural education, his bread by the sweat of his brow.

‘But there are no farmers who teach—none who take care of their boys, or men.’

Miserables again, whose fault is that? The landlords choose to make the farmers middlemen between the peasants and themselves—grinders, not of corn, but of [12]flesh,—for their rent. And of course you dare not put your children under them to be taught.

Read Gotthelf’s ‘Ulric the Farm Servant’ on this matter. It is one of his great novels,—great as Walter Scott’s, in the truth and vitality of it, only inferior in power of design. I would translate it all in Fors, if I had time; and indeed hope to make it soon one of my school series, of which, and other promised matters, or delayed ones, I must now take some order, and give some account, in this opening letter of the year, as far as I can, only, before leaving the young farmer among the Blacks, please observe that he goes there because you have all made Artificial Blacks of yourselves, and unmelodious Christys,—nothing but the whites of your eyes showing through the unclean skins of you, here, in Merry England, where there was once green ground to farm instead of ashes.

And first,—here’s the woodcut, long promised, of a rose-leaf cut by the leaf-cutting bee, true in size and shape; a sound contribution to Natural History, so far as it reaches. Much I had to say of it, but am not in humour to-day. Happily, the letter from a valued Companion, Art. III. in Notes, may well take place of any talk of mine.7

Secondly, I promised a first lesson in writing, of which, [13]therefore, (that we may see what is our present knowledge on the subject, and what farther we may safely ask Theuth8 to teach,) I have had engraved two examples, one of writing in the most authoritative manner, used for modern service, and the other of writing by a practised scribe of the fourteenth century. To make the comparison fair, we must take the religious, and therefore most careful, scripture of both dates; so, for example of modern sacred scripture, I take the casting up of a column in my banker’s book; and for the ancient, a letter A, with a few following words, out of a Greek Psalter, which [14]is of admirable and characteristic, but not (by any honest copyist,) inimitable execution.

Here then, first, is modern writing; in facsimile of which I have thought it worth while to employ Mr. Burgess’s utmost skill; for it seems to me a fact of profound significance that all the expedients we have invented for saving time, by steam and machinery, (not to speak of the art of printing,) leave us yet so hurried, and flurried, that we cannot produce any lovelier calligraphy than this, even to certify the gratifying existence of a balance of eleven hundred and forty-two pounds, thirteen shillings, and twopence, while the old writer, though required, eventually, to produce the utmost possible number of entire psalters with his own hand, yet has time for the execution of every initial letter of them in the manner here exhibited.

Respecting which, you are to observe that this is pure writing; not painting or drawing, but the expression of form by lines such as a pen can easily produce, (or a brush used with the point, in the manner of a pen;) and with a certain habitual currency and fluent [15]habit of finger, yet not dashing or flourishing, but with perfect command of direction in advance, and moment of pause, at any point.

You may at first, and very naturally, suppose, good reader, that it will not advance your power of English writing to copy a Greek sentence. But, with your pardon, the first need, for all beautiful writing, is that your hand should be, in the true and virtuous sense, free; that is to say, able to move in any direction it is ordered, and not cramped to a given slope, or to any given form of letter. And also, whether you can learn Greek or not, it is well, (and perfectly easy,) to learn the Greek alphabet, that if by chance a questionable word occur in your Testament, or in scientific books, you may be able to read it, and even look it out in a dictionary. And this particular manner of Greek writing I wish you to notice, because it is such as Victor [16]Carpaccio represents St. Jerome reading in his study; and I shall be able to illustrate by it some points of Byzantine character of extreme historical interest.

Copy, therefore, this letter A, and the following words, in as perfect facsimile as you can, again and again, not being content till a tracing from the original fits your copy to the thickness of its penstroke. And even by the time next Fors comes out, you will begin to know how to use a pen. Also, you may at spare times practise copying any clearly-printed type, only without the difference of thickness in parts of letters; the best writing for practical purposes is that which most resembles print, connected only, for speed, by the current line.

Next, for some elementary practice of the same kind in the more difficult art of Reading.

A young student, belonging to the working classes, who has been reading books a little too difficult or too grand for him, asking me what he shall read next, I have told him, ‘Waverley’—with extreme care.

It is true that, in grandeur and difficulty, I have not a whit really lowered his standard; for it is an achievement as far beyond him, at present, to understand ‘Waverley,’ as to understand the ‘Odyssey;’ but the road, though as steep and high-reaching as any he has travelled, is smoother for him. What further directions I am now going to give him, will be good for all young men of active minds who care to make such activity serviceable. [17]

Read your ‘Waverley,’ I repeat, with extreme care: and of every important person in the story, consider first what the virtues are; then what the faults inevitable to them by nature and breeding; then what the faults they might have avoided; then what the results to them of their faults and virtues, under the appointment of fate.

Do this after reading each chapter; and write down the lessons which it seems to you that Scott intended in it; and what he means you to admire, what to despise.

Secondly,—supposing you to be, in any the smallest real measure, a Christian,—begin the history of Abraham, as preparatory to that of the first Law-giver whom you have in some understanding to obey. And the history of Abraham must be led up to, by reading carefully from Genesis ix. 20th, forward, and learning the main traditions which the subsequent chapters contain.

And observe, it does not matter in the least to you, at present, how far these traditions are true. Your business is only to know what is said in Genesis. That does not matter to you, you think? Much less does it matter what Mr. Smith or Mr. Robinson said last night at that public meeting; or whether Mr. Black, or his brother, shot Mrs. White; or anything else whatever, small or great, that you will find said or related in the morning papers. But to know what is said in Genesis will enable you to understand, in some sort, the [18]effect of that saying on men’s minds, through at least two thousand years of the World’s History. Which, if you mean to be a scholar and gentleman, you must make some effort to do.

And this is the way to set about it. You see the tenth chapter of Genesis names to you the children, and children’s children, of Noah, from whom the nations of the world (it says) came, and by whom the lands of the world (it says) were divided.

You must learn them by rote, in order. You know already, I suppose, the three names, Shem, Ham, and Japheth; begin with Shem, and learn the names of his sons, thus:

[19]

Now, you see that makes a pretty ornamental letter T, with a little joint in the middle of its stalk.

And this letter T you must always be able to write, out of your head, without a moment’s hesitation. However stupid you may be at learning by rote, thus much can always be done by dint of sheer patient repetition. Read the centre column straight down, over and again, for an hour together, and you will find it at last begin to stick in your head. Then, as soon as it is fast there, say it over and over again when it is dark, or when you are out walking, till you can’t make a mistake in it.

Then observe farther that Peleg, in whose days the earth was divided, had a brother named Joktan, who had thirteen children. Of these, you need not mind the names of ten; but the odd three are important to you. Sheba, Ophir, and Havilah. You have perhaps heard of these before; and assuredly, if you go on reading Fors, you will hear of them again.

And these thirteen children of Joktan, you see, had their dwelling “from Mesha, as thou goest unto Sephar, a mount of the East.” I don’t know anything about Mesha and Sephar, yet; but I may: in the meantime, learn the sentence, and recollect that these people are fixed somewhere, at any rate, because they are to be Masters of Gold, which is fixed in Eastern, or Western, mountains; but that the children of the other brother, Peleg, can go wherever they like, [20]and often where they shouldn’t,—for “in his days was the earth divided.” Recollect also that the children of both brothers, or, in brief, the great Indian gold-possessing race, and the sacred race of prophets and kings of the higher spiritual world, are in the 21st verse of this chapter called “all the children of Eber.” If you learn so much as this well, it’s enough for this month: but I may as well at once give you the forms you have to learn for the other two sons.

The seventh verse is to be noted as giving the gold-masters of Africa, under two of the same names as those of Asia, but must not be learned for fear of confusion. The form above given must be amplified and commented on variously, but is best learned first in its simplicity.

[21]

I leave this blunt-stalked and flat-headed letter T, also, in its simplicity, and we will take up the needful detail in next Fors.

Together with which, (all the sheets being now printed, and only my editorial preface wanting,) I doubt not will be published the first volume of the classical series of books which I purpose editing for St. George’s library;—Xenophon’s Economist, namely, done into English for us by two of my Oxford pupils; this volume, I hope, soon to be followed by Gotthelf’s Ulric the Farm-servant, either in French or English, as the Second Fors, faithfully observant of copyright and other dues, may decide; meantime, our first historical work, relating the chief decision of Atropos respecting the fate of England after the Conquest, is being written for me by a friend, and Fellow of my college of Corpus Christi, whose help I accept, in St. George’s name,—all the more joyfully, because he is our head gardener, no less than our master-historian.

And for the standard theological writings which are ultimately to be the foundation of this body of secular literature, I have chosen seven authors, whose lives and works, so far as the one can be traced or the other certified, shall be, with the best help I can obtain from the good scholars of Oxford, prepared one by one in perfect editions for the St. George’s schools. These seven books will contain, in as many volumes as may be needful, the lives and writings of [22]the men who have taught the purest theological truth hitherto known to the Jews, Greeks, Latins, Italians, and English; namely, Moses, David, Hesiod, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and, for seventh, summing the whole with vision of judgment, St. John the Divine.

The Hesiod I purpose, if my life is spared, to translate myself (into prose), and to give in complete form. Of Virgil I shall only take the two first Georgics, and the sixth book of the Æneid, but with the Douglas translation;9 adding the two first books of Livy, for completion of the image of Roman life. Of Chaucer, I take the authentic poems, except the Canterbury Tales; together with, be they authentic or not, the Dream, and the fragment of the translation of the Romance of the Rose, adding some French chivalrous literature of the same date. I shall so order this work, that, in such measure as it may be possible to me, it shall be in a constantly progressive relation to the granted years of my life. The plan of it I give now, and will explain in full detail, that my scholars may carry it out, if I cannot. [23]

And now let my general readers observe, finally, about all reading,—You must read, for the nourishment of your mind, precisely under the moral laws which, regulate your eating for the nourishment of the body. That is to say, you must not eat for the pleasure of eating, nor read, for the pleasure of reading. But, if you manage yourself rightly, you will intensely enjoy your dinner, and your book. If you have any sense, you can easily follow out this analogy: I have not time at present to do it for you; only be sure it holds, to the minutest particular, with this difference only, that the vices and virtues of reading are more harmful on the one side, and higher on the other, as the soul is more precious than the body. Gluttonous reading is a worse vice than gluttonous eating; filthy and foul reading, a much more loathsome habit than filthy eating. Epicurism in books is much more difficult of attainment than epicurism in meat, but plain and virtuous feeding the most entirely pleasurable.

And now, one step of farther thought will enable you to settle a great many questions with one answer.

As you may neither eat, nor read, for the pleasure of eating or reading, so you may do nothing else for the pleasure of it, but for the use. The moral difference between a man and a beast is, that the one acts primarily for use, the other for pleasure. And all acting for pleasure before use, or instead of use, is, in one word, ‘Fornication.’ That is the accurate meaning [24]of the words ‘harlotry,’ or ‘fornication,’ as used in the Bible, wherever they occur spoken of nations, and especially in all the passages relating to the great or spiritual Babylon.

And the Law of God concerning man is, that if he acts for use—that is to say, as God’s servant;—he shall be rewarded with such pleasure as no heart can conceive nor tongue tell; only it is revealed by the Spirit, as that Holy Ghost of life and health possesses us; but if we act for pleasure instead of use, we shall be punished by such misery as no heart can conceive nor tongue tell; but which can only be revealed by the adverse spirit, whose is the power of death. And that—I assure you—is absolute, inevitable, daily and hourly Fact for us, to the simplicity of which I to-day invite your scholarly and literary attention. [25]

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; 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 [42]note at page 38, and make it the fourth word, instead; to put a note of interrogation at the end of clause in the fourth line of page 35, and to insert an s, changing ‘death’ into ‘deaths’ in the third line of page 27;—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 Bishops, Soldiers, Lawyers, and Squires;—which, perhaps, he imagined me to have spoken jestingly; or it may be, in witlessness; or it may be, in voluble incipient insanity. Admitting myself in no small degree open to such suspicion, I am now about to re-word some matters which madness would gambol from; and I beg the reader to observe that any former gambolling on my part, awkward or untimely as it may have seemed, has been quite as serious, and intentionally progressive, as Morgiana’s dance round the captain of the Forty Thieves.

If, then, the reader will look at the analysis of Episcopacy in ‘Sesame and Lilies,’ the first volume of all my works; next at the chapter on Episcopacy in ‘Time and Tide;’ and lastly, refer to what he can gather in the past series of ‘Fors,’ he will find the united gist of all to be, that Bishops cannot take, much less give, account of men’s souls unless they first take and give account of their bodies: and that, [43]therefore, all existing poverty and crime in their dioceses, discoverable by human observation, must be, when they are Bishops indeed, clearly known to, and describable by them, or their subordinates. Of whom the number, and discipline in St. George’s Company, if by God’s grace it ever take the form I intend, will be founded on the institution of the same by the first Bishop, or more correctly Archbishop, whom the Christian church professes to obey. For what can possibly be the use of printing the Ten Commandments which he delivered, in gold,—framing them above the cathedral altar,—pronouncing them in a prelatically sonorous voice,—and arranging the responsive supplications of the audience to the tune of an organ of the best manufacture, if the commanding Bishops institute no inquiry whatever into the physical power of—say this starving shoemaker in Seven Dials,—to obey such a command as ‘thou shalt not covet’ in the article of meat; or of his son to honour in any available measure either the father or mother, of whom the one has departed to seek her separate living, and the other is lying dead with his head in the fireplace.

Therefore, as I have just said, our Bishops in St. George’s Company will be constituted in order founded on that appointed by the first Bishop of Israel, namely, that their Primate, or Supreme Watchman, shall appoint under him “out of all the people, able men, such as [44]fear God, men of truth, hating covetousness, and place such over them to be rulers (or, at the least, observers) of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens;”1 and that of these episcopic centurions, captains of fifty, and captains of ten, there will be required clear account of the individual persons they are set over;—even a baby being considered as a decimal quantity not to be left out of their account by the decimal Bishops,—in which episcopacy, however, it is not improbable that a queenly power may be associated, with Norman caps for mitres, and for symbol of authority, instead of the crosier, (or crook, for disentangling lost sheep of souls from among the brambles,) the broom, for sweeping diligently till they find lost silver of souls among the dust.

You think I jest, still, do you? Anything but that; only if I took off the Harlequin’s mask for a moment, you would say I was simply mad. Be it so, however, for this time.

I simply and most utterly mean, that, so far as my best judgment can reach, the present Bishops of the English Church, (with only one exception, known to me,—the Bishop of Natal,) have forfeited and fallen from their Bishoprics by transgression; and betrayal of their Lord, first by simony, and secondly, and chiefly, by lying for God with one mouth, and contending for their own personal interests as a professional body, as [45]if these were the cause of Christ. And that in the assembly and Church of future England, there must be, (and shall be so far as this present body of believers in God and His law now called together in the name of St. Michael and St. George are concerned,) set up and consecrated other Bishops; and under them, lower ministering officers and true “Dogs of the Lord,” who, with stricter inquisition than ever Dominican, shall take knowledge—not of creeds, but of every man’s way and means of life; and shall be either able to avouch his conduct as honourable and just, or bound to impeach it as shameful and iniquitous, and this down to minute details;—above all, or before all, particulars of revenue, every companion, retainer, or associate in the Company’s work being bound to keep such accounts that the position of his affairs may be completely known to the Bishops at any moment: and all bankruptcies or treacheries in money matters thus rendered impossible. Not that direct inquisition will be often necessary; for when the true nature of Theft, with the other particulars of the Moral Law, are rightly taught in our schools, grown-up men will no more think of stealing in business than in burglary. It is merely through the quite bestial ignorance of the Moral Law in which the English Bishops have contentedly allowed their flocks to be brought up, that any of the modern English conditions of trade are possible.

Of course, for such work, I must be able to find [46]what Jethro of Midian assumes could be found at once in Israel, these “men of truth, hating covetousness,” and all my friends laugh me to scorn for thinking to find any such.

Naturally, in a Christian country, it will be difficult enough; but I know there are still that kind of people among Midianites, Caffres, Red Indians, and the destitute, afflicted, and tormented, in dens and caves of the earth, where God has kept them safe from missionaries:—and, as I above said, even out of the rotten mob of money-begotten traitors calling itself a ‘people’ in England, I do believe I shall be able to extricate, by slow degrees, some faithful and true persons, hating covetousness, and fearing God.

And you will please to observe that this hate and fear are flat opposites one to the other; so that if a man fear or reverence God, he must hate covetousness; and if he fear or reverence covetousness, he must hate God; and there is no intermediate way whatsoever. Nor is it possible for any man, wilfully rich, to be a God-fearing person; but only for those who are involuntarily rich, and are making all the haste they prudently and piously can, to be poor; for money is a strange kind of seed; scattered, it is poison; but set, it is bread: so that a man whom God has appointed to be a sower must bear as lightly as he may the burden of gold and of possessions, till he find the proper places to sow them in. But persons desiring to be rich, and accumulating [47]riches, always hate God, and never fear Him; the idol they do fear—(for many of them are sincerely religious) is an imaginary, or mind-sculptured God of their own making, to their own liking; a God who allows usury, delights in strife and contention, and is very particular about everybody’s going to his synagogues on Sunday.

Indeed, when Adam Smith formally, in the name of the philosophers of Scotland and England, set up this opposite God, on the hill of cursing against blessing, Ebal against Gerizim; and declared that all men ‘naturally’ desired their neighbours’ goods; and that in the name of Covetousness, all the nations of the earth should be blessed,—it is true, that the half-bred and half-witted Scotchman had not gift enough in him to carve so much as his own calf’s head on a whinstone with his own hand; much less to produce a well molten and forged piece of gold, for old Scottish faith to break its tables of ten commandments at sight of. But, in leaving to every artless and ignorant boor among us the power of breeding, in imagination, each his own particular calf, and placidly worshipping that privately fatted animal; or, perhaps,—made out of the purest fat of it in molten Tallow instead of molten Gold,—images, which may be in any inventive moment, misshapen anew to his mind, Economical Theology has granted its disciples more perfect and fitting privilege.

From all taint or compliance with such idolatry, the [48]Companions of St. George have vowed to withdraw themselves; writing, and signing their submission to, the First and great Commandment, so called by Christ,—and the Second which is like unto it.

And since on these two hang all the Law and the Prophets, in signing these two promises they virtually vow obedience to all the Law of which Christ then spoke; and belief of all the Prophets of which Christ then spoke. What that law is; who those prophets are;—whether they only prophesied ‘until John,’ or whether St. Paul’s command to all Christians living, “Follow after charity, and desire spiritual gifts, but rather that ye may prophesy,”—is an important little commandment following the two great ones, I cannot tell you in a single letter, even if I altogether knew myself. Partly I do know;—and can teach you, if you will work. No one can teach you anything worth learning but through manual labour; the very bread of life can only be got out of the chaff of it by “rubbing it in your hands.”

You vow, then, that you will at least strive to keep both of these commandments—as far as, what some would call the corruption, but what in honest people is the weakness, of flesh, permits. If you cannot watch an hour, because you don’t love Christ enough to care about His agony, that is your weakness; but if you first sell Him, and then kiss Him, that is your corruption. I don’t know if I can keep either you or myself [49]awake; but at least we may put a stop to our selling and kissing. Be sure that you are serving Christ, till you are tired and can do no more, for that time: and then, even if you have not breath enough left to say “Master, Master” with,—He will not mind.

Begin therefore ‘to-day,’—(which you may, in passing, note to be your present leader’s signal-word or watch-word),—to do good work for Him—whether you live or die,—(see first promise asked of you, Letter II., page 21, explained in Letter VII., page 19, etc.,)—and see that every stroke of this work—be it weak or strong, shall therefore be done in love of God and your neighbour, and in hatred of covetousness. Which that you may hate accurately, wisely, and well, it is needful that you should thoroughly know, when you see it, or feel it. What covetousness is, therefore, let me beg you at once clearly to understand, by meditating on these following definitions.

Avarice means the desire to collect money, not goods. A ‘miser’ or ‘miserable person’ desires to collect goods only for the sake of turning them into money. If you can read French or German, read Molière’s l’Avare, and then get Gotthelf’s ‘Bernese Stories,’ and read ‘Schnitzfritz,’ with great care.

Avarice is a quite natural passion, and, within due limits, healthy. The addition of coin to coin, and of cipher to cipher, is a quite proper pleasure of human life, under due rule; the two stories I ask you to read [50]are examples of its disease; which arises mainly in strong and stupid minds, when by evil fortune they have never been led to think or feel.

Frugality. The disposition to save or spare what we have got, without any desire to gain more. It is constantly, of course, associated with avarice; but quite as frequently with generosity, and is often merely an extreme degree of housewifely habit. Study the character of Alison Wilson in ‘Old Mortality.’

Covetousness. The desire of possessing more than we have, of any good thing whatsoever of which we have already enough for our uses, (adding house to house, and field to field). It is much connected with pride; but more with restlessness of mind and desire of novelty; much seen in children who tire of their toys and want new ones. The pleasure in having things ‘for one’s very own’ is a very subtle element in it. When I gave away my Loire series of Turner drawings to Oxford, I thought I was rational enough to enjoy them as much in the University gallery as in my own study. But not at all! I find I can’t bear to look at them in the gallery, because they are ‘mine’ no more.

Now, you observe, that your creed of St. George says you believe in the nobleness of human nature—that is to say, that all our natural instincts are honourable. Only it is not always easy to say which of them are natural and which not. [51]

For instance, Adam Smith says that it is ‘natural’ for every person to covet his neighbour’s goods, and want to change his own for them; wherein is the origin of Trade, and Universal Salvation.

But God says, ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods;’ and God, who made you, does in that written law express to you His knowledge of your inner heart, and instruct you in the medicine for it. Therefore on due consideration, you will find assuredly it is quite unnatural in you to covet your neighbour’s goods.

Consider, first, of the most precious, the wife. It is natural for you to think your own the best and prettiest of women; not at all to want to change her for somebody else’s wife. If you like somebody else’s better than yours, and this somebody else likes yours better than his, and you both want to change, you are both in a non-natural condition, and entirely out of the sphere of happy human love.

Again. It is natural for you to think your own house and garden the nicest house and garden that ever were. If, as should always be, they were your father’s before you, and he and you have both taken proper care of them, they are a treasure to you which no money could buy,—the leaving them is always pain,—the return to them, a new thrill and wakening to life. They are a home and place of root to you, as if you were founded on the ground like its walls, or grew into it like its flowers. You would no more [52]willingly transplant yourself elsewhere than the espalier pear-tree of your own graffing would pull itself out by the roots to climb another trellis. That is the natural mind of a man. “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house.” You are in an entirely non-natural state if you do, and, properly speaking, never had a house in your life.

“Nor his man-servant, nor his maid-servant.” It is a ‘natural’ thing for masters to get proud of those who serve them; and a ‘natural’ thing for servants to get proud of the masters they serve. (You see above how Bacon connects the love of the master with the love of the country.) Nay, if the service has been true, if the master has indeed asked for what was good for himself, and the servant has done what was good for his master, they cannot choose but like each other; to have a new servant, or a new master, would be a mere horror to both of them. I have got two Davids, and a Kate, that I wouldn’t change for anybody else’s servants in the world; and I believe the only quarrel they have with me is that I don’t give them enough to do for me:—this very morning, I must stop writing, presently, to find the stoutest of the Davids some business, or he will be miserable all day.

“Nor his ox, nor his ass.” If you have petted both of your own, properly, from calf and foal, neither these, nor anything else of yours, will you desire to change [53]for “anything that is his.” Do you really think I would change my pen for your’s, or my inkstand, or my arm-chair, or my Gainsborough little girl, or my Turner pass of St. Gothard? I would see you—— very uncomfortable—first. And that is the natural state of a human being who has taken anything like proper pains to make himself comfortable in God’s good world, and get some of the right good, and true wealth of it.

For, you observe farther, the commandment is only that thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s goods. It does not say that you are not to covet any goods. How could you covet your neighbour’s, if both your neighbour and you were forbidden to have any? Very far the contrary; in the first piece of genealogic geography I have given you to learn, the first descriptive sentence of the land of Havilah is,—“where there is gold;” and it goes on to say, “And the gold of that land is of the best: there is bdellium, and the onyx stone.” In the Vulgate, ‘dellium’ and ‘lapis onichinus.’ In the Septuagint, ‘anthrax,’ and the ‘prase-stone.’

Now, my evangelical friends, here is this book which you call “Word of God,” and idolatrously print for your little children’s reading and your own, as if your eternal lives depended on every word of it. And here, of the very beginning of the world—and the beginning of property—it professes to tell you something. [54]But what? Have you the smallest idea what ‘dellium’ is? Might it not as well be bellium, or gellium, or pellium, or mellium, for all you know about it? Or do you know what an onyx is? or an anthrax? or a prase? Is not the whole verse pure and absolute gibberish and gabble to you; and do you expect God will thank you for talking gibberish and gabble to your children, and telling them—that is His Word? Partly, however, the verse is only senseless to you, because you have never had the sense to look at the stones which God has made. But in still greater measure, it is necessarily senseless, because it is not the word of God, but an imperfectly written tradition, which, however, being a most venerable and precious tradition, you do well to make your children read, provided also you take pains to explain to them so much sense as there is in it, and yourselves do reverently obey so much law as there is in it. Towards which intelligence and obedience, we will now take a step or two farther from the point of pause in last Fors.

Remember that the three sons of Noah are, respectively,

The sons of Shem are the perceivers of Splendour;[55]—they see what is best in visible things, and reach forward to the invisible.

The sons of Japheth are the perceivers of Justice and Duty; and deal securely with all that is under their hand.

The sons of Ham are the perceivers of Evil or Nakedness; and are slaves therefore for ever—‘servants of servants’: when in power, therefore, either helpless or tyrannous.

It is best to remember among the nations descending from the three great sires, the Persians, as the sons of Shem; Greeks, as the sons of Japheth; Assyrians, as the sons of Ham. The Jewish captivity to the Assyrian then takes its perfect meaning.

This month, therefore, take the first descendant of Ham—Cush; and learn the following verses of Gen. x.:—

“And Cush begat Nimrod; he began to be a mighty one in the earth.

“He was a mighty hunter before the Lord.

“And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel in the land of Shinar.

“Out of that land went forth Asshur, and builded Nineveh.”

These verses will become in future a centre of thought to you, whereupon you may gather, as on one root-germ, what you farther learn of the influence of hunting on [56]the minds of men; and of the sources of Assyrian power, and causes of the Assyrian ruin in Birs Nemroud, out of which you have had those hunting-pieces brought to the narrow passage in the British Museum.

For further subject of thought, this month, read of Carey’s Dante, the 31st canto of the ‘Inferno,’ with extreme care; and for your current writing lesson, copy these lines of Italics, which I have printed in as close resemblance as I can to the Italics of the Aldine edition of 1502.

The putting of the capital letters that begin the stanza, outside, is a remaining habit of the scribes who wrote for the illuminator, and indicated the letter to be enlarged with ornament at the side of the text.

Of these larger capitals, the A given in last Fors, is of a Byzantine Greek school, in which though there is much quiet grace, there is no elasticity or force in the lines. They are always languid, and without spring or evidence of nervous force in the hand. They are not, therefore, perfect models for English writers, though they are useful as exercises in tranquillity of [57]line: and I chose for that and many more reasons, that letter and sentence for our first exercise. But my letter B is to be given from the Northern Schools; and will have spring and power in it, which you cannot at once hope to imitate in a complete letter; and must be prepared for by copying a mere incipient fragment or flourish of ornamental line.

This line has been drawn for you, very leisurely indeed, by one of the gentlest of the animals living on our English south downs,—and yet, quietly done as it is, being the result of wholly consistent energy, it is a line which a Byzantine Greek would never have produced [58]in writing, nor even in architecture, except when he was imitating an Ionian one.

You are to draw a horizontal line through the point in the centre of this figure. Then measure the breadth of the six coils on each side, counting from the centre backwards and forwards.

Then draw a vertical line through centre, and measure the breadths above and below. Then draw the complete curve lightly through these fixed points—alter it to your mind—and then paint over it the determined line, with any dark colour and a camel’s hair brush.

The difficulty is to draw it so that there shall not be the smallest portion of it which is not approaching the inner curve, and narrowing the intermediate space. And you will find no trick of compasses will draw it. Choose any number of centres you like, and still I defy you to draw the curve mechanically; it can be done only as I have done it myself, with the free hand, correcting it and correcting till I got it right.2

When you have succeeded, to any moderate extent, in doing this, your hand will have begun to receive the power of executing a serene and dignified flourish instead of a vulgar ‘dash.’ And you may also begin to understand that the word ‘flourish’ itself, as applied to writing, means the springing of its lines into floral exuberance,—therefore, strong procession and growth, which must be in a spiral line, for the stems of plants [59]are always spirals. (See ‘Proserpina,’ Number IV.); and that this bursting out into foliage, in calm swiftness, is a totally different action from the impudent and useless sweeps and loops of vulgar writing.

Further. As your eyes get accustomed to the freely drawn, unmechanical, immeasurable line, you will be able, if you care about architecture, to know a Greek Ionic volute from a vulgar day-labourer’s copy of it—done with compasses and calculations. And you will know how the volute of the throne of Lippi’s Madonna, (though that is studied from the concave side of the shell) shows him to have been Etruscan-bred; and you will begin to see what his power was; and to laugh at the books of our miserable modern builders, filled with elaborate devices for drawing volutes with bits of circles:—the wretches might as well try to draw the lips of Sir Joshua’s Circe,—or the smile in her cat’s triangular eyes, in that manner. Only in Eleutheria of soul and body, shall any human creature draw so much as one rightly bending line.

Any human creature, I say. Little freedom, either of body or soul, had the poor architect who drew this our first model line for us; and yet and yet, simple as his life and labours may be, it will take our best wits to understand them. I find myself, at present, without any startpoint for attempt to understand them. I found the downs near Arundel, being out on them in a sunny day just after Christmas, sprinkled all over with [60]their pretty white shells, (none larger than a sixpence, my drawing being increased as about seven to one, in line, or fifty to one, square,) and all empty, unless perchance some spectral remnant of their dead masters remain inside;—and I can’t answer a single question I ask myself about them. I see they most of them have six whirls, or whorls. Had they six when they were young? have they never more when they are old? Certainly some shells have periodical passion of progress—and variously decorative stops and rests; but these little white continuities down to this woful time of their Christmas emptiness, seem to have deduced their spiral caves in peace.

But it’s of no use to waste time in ‘thinking.’ I shall go and ask some pupil of my dear old friend Dr. Gray at the British Museum, and rejoice myself with a glance at the volutes of the Erectheium—fair home of Athenian thought. [61]

I find it wholly impossible to crush into one Fors what I have been gathering of Bible lesson, natural history lesson, and writing lesson, and to leave room enough for what I have to give of immediate explanation to the Companions, now daily increasing in number. My readers must bear with me—I cannot do more than I am doing, though every day I wonder more at there being so many things apparently my duty to do, while I have only two feeble hands for all of them.

But this much of general statement of the meaning of our Companionship is now absolutely necessary.

Of course, the first natural idea taken up by persons who merely hear talk, or read newspapers, about the Company, is that their domain is intended for a refuge for the persons who join it—that within its walls the poor are at once to be made rich, and the sorrowful happy.

Alas, this is not by any means the notion of the St. George’s Company. It is to be a band of delivering [80]knights—not of churls needing deliverance; of eager givers and servants—not of eager beggars,1 and persons needing service. It is only the Rich, and the Strong, whom I receive for Companions,—those who come not to be ministered unto, but to minister. Rich, yet some of them in other kind of riches than the world’s; strong, yet some in other than the world’s strength. But this much at least of literal wealth and strength they must have,—the power, and formed habit, of self-support. I accept no Companion by whom I am not convinced that the Society will be aided rather than burdened; and although I value intelligence, resolution, and personal strength, more than any other riches, I hope to find, in a little while, that there are people in the world who can hold money without being blinded, by their possession of it, to justice or duty.

The Companions whom I accept will be divided, according to their means and circumstances, into three classes.

The first and highest class will be called “Comites Ministrantes,” “Companions Servant.” It will be composed of the few who devote their main energy to the work of the Company; and who, as I do myself, and as the Master must always, pursue their private avocations only in subjection to its interests, being at the same time in positions absolutely independent, and openly shown to be so. [81]

The second, or middle class, will be called “Comites Militantes,” “Companions Militant.”

These will be persons occupied actually in manual labour on the ground, or in any work which the Master may order, for the fulfilment of the Society’s functions; being dependent on such labour for their maintenance, under the conditions fixed by the Company’s statutes.

The third and lowest order will be called “Comites Consilii,” (Friends of, or in, Council,) “Companions Consular,” who will form the general body of the Society, being occupied in their own affairs as earnestly as before they joined it; but giving it the tenth of their income; and in all points, involving its principles, obeying the orders of the Master. Thus almost any tradesman may continue his trade, being a Companion; but, if a jeweller, he must not sell false jewels; or if a butcher, (I have one accepted already, and I very much want to get a butcher’s daughter, if I could; but she won’t come,) must not sell bad meat.

I at first meant them to be called Censors, or Companions Estimant, because when the Society comes into real work, the sentences of fine, or other disgrace, pronounced by the marshals’ officers, and the general modes of determining quality and value of goods, must be always ratified by majority of this order, of the Companions, in whom also, by virtue of their number, the election, and therefore censorship, of the Master, will necessarily be vested. [82]

To these last, especially, I have now some special matters to write.

Will you please look back to the Fors of December 24th, last year, p. 278, and tell me,—or rather, which is chiefly needful, answer to yourselves, how far you have reflected, since reading it, on the nature of “unfruitful works of darkness;” how many you have abandoned, and how many reproved. It is too probable that you have not, even yet, the slightest idea what works of darkness are. You know,—they can’t mean merely murder, or adultery, or theft. You don’t, when you go to church, mean to pray that you may have grace to give up committing murder or adultery, or that you may ‘rather reprove them’? But what then is it that you pray to give up? If you don’t know, are you not, yet, in the least, ashamed of yourselves, for going every Sunday, if not every day, to pray to God, without having the dimmest idea what you mean to ask Him for?

Well,—not to be farther teazing about it,—in the first and simple sense, works of darkness are useless, or ill-done, or half-done, things, which pretend to be good, or to be wholly done; and so mislead or betray.

In the deeper and final sense, a work of darkness is one that seeks concealment, and conceals facts; or even casts disdain and disgrace on facts.

A work of light is one that seeks light, and that, not for its own sake, but to light all men; so that all workers [83]of good work delight in witnesses; only with true desire that the witnesses’ pleasure may be greater than theirs; and that the Eternal witnesses—the Cloud around us, and Powers above—may have chief pleasure of all:—(see on this matter, ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ page 54). So that, of these works, what was written of St. Bernard must be always true, “Opera sancti Patris velut Sol in conspectu Dei;” for indeed they are a true Light of the world, infinitely better in the Creator’s sight than its dead sunshine; and the discovery by modern science that all mortal strength is from the Sun, while it has thrown foolish persons into atheism, is, to wise ones, the most precious testimony to their faith yet given by physical nature; for it gives us the arithmetical and measurable assurance that men vitally active are living sunshine, having the roots of their souls set in sunlight, as the roots of a tree are in the earth; not that the dust is therefore the God of the tree, but the Tree is the animation of the dust, and the living Soul, of the sunshine. And now you will understand the meaning of the words on our St. George’s wealth,—“Sit splendor.”

And you must take care that your works do shine before men, if it may be, as a lamp; but at least, as a shield;—nay, if your Captain in Heaven wills it, as a sword.

For the failure of all good people nowadays is that, associating politely with wicked persons, countenancing them in their wickedness, and often joining in [84]it, they think to avert its consequences by collaterally labouring to repair the ruin it has caused; and while, in the morning, they satisfy their hearts by ministering to the wants of two or three destitute persons, in the evening they dine with, envy, and prepare themselves to follow the example of, the rich speculator who has caused the destitution of two or three thousand. They are thus destroying more in hours than they can amend in years; or, at the best, vainly feeding the famine-struck populations, in the rear of a devouring army, always on the increase in mass of numbers, and rapidity of march.

Now I call on the St. George’s Company, first, to separate themselves clearly, as a body, from persons who practise recognized, visible, unquestionable iniquity. They are to have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of Darkness; but to walk as Children of Light.

Literally, observe. Those phrases of the Bible are entirely evaded, because we never apply them to immediate practice.

St. George’s Companions are to have no fellowship with works of darkness; no companionship whatsoever with recognizable mischief, or mischievous men. Of every person of your acquaintance, you are solemnly to ask yourselves, ‘Is this man a swindler, a liar, a gambler, an adulterer, a selfish oppressor, and task-master?’ [85]

Don’t suppose you can’t tell. You can tell with perfect ease; or, if you meet any mysterious personage of whom it proves difficult to ascertain whether he be rogue or not, keep clear of him till you know. With those whom you know to be honest, know to be innocent, know to be striving, with main purpose, to serve mankind and honour their God, you are humbly and lovingly to associate yourselves: and with none others.

“You don’t like to set yourself up for being better than other people? You dare not judge harshly of your fellow-creatures?”

I do not tell you to judge them. I only tell you not to dine with them, and not to deal with them. That they lose the pleasure of your company, or the profit on your custom, is no crushing punishment. To their own Master they stand or fall; but to your Master, Christ,2 you must stand, with your best might; and in this manner only, self-asserting as you may think it, can you confess Him before men. Why do you suppose that thundrous word of His impends over your denial of Him, “Whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before Angels,” but because you are sure to be constantly tempted to such denial?

How, therefore, observe, in modern days, are you so tempted. Is not the temptation rather, as it seems, [86]to confess Him? Is it difficult and shameful to go to church?—would it not require more courage to stay away? Is it difficult or shameful to shut your shop on Sunday, in the East,—or, to abstain from your ride in the Park on Sunday, in the West? Is it dangerous to hold family worship in your house, or dishonourable to be seen with a cross on your Prayer Book? None of these modes or aspects of confession will bring any outcry against you from the world. You will have its good word, on the contrary, for each and all of them. But declare that you mean to speak truth,—and speak it, for an hour; that you mean to abstain from luxury,—and abstain from it, for a day; that you, obeying God’s law, will resolutely refuse fellowship with the disobedient;—and be ‘not at home’ to them, for a week: and hear then what the High Priests’ servants will say to you, round the fire.

And observe, it is in charity for them, much more than by duty to others, that you are required to do this. For half, at least, of these Caiaphas’ servants sin through pure ignorance, confirmed by custom. The essential difference in business, for instance, between a man of honour and a rogue, is that the first tries to give as much to his customer for his money as he can, and the second to give as little; but how many are at present engaged in business who are trying to sell their goods at as high a price as possible, supposing that effort to be the very soul and vital principle of [87]business! Now by simply asserting to these ignorant persons that they are rogues, whether they know it or not; and that, in the present era of general enlightenment, gentlemen and ladies must not only learn to spell and to dance, but also to know the difference between cheating their neighbours and serving them; and that, as on the whole it is inexpedient to receive people who don’t know how to express themselves grammatically, in the higher circles of society, much more is it inexpedient to receive those who don’t know how to behave themselves honestly. And by the mere assertion, practically, of this assured fact to your acquaintance’ faces, by the direct intervention of a deal door between theirs and yours, you will startle them out of their Rogues’ Paradise in a most healthful manner, and be the most orthodox and eloquent evangelical preacher to them that they have ever heard since they were born.

But all this must, of course, be done with extreme tenderness and modesty, though with absolute decision; and under much submission to their elders by young people—especially those living in their father’s houses. I shall not, of course, receive any Companions under age; but already there are some names on my list of young unmarried women: and, while I have shown in all former writings that I hold the power of such to be the greatest, because the purest, of all social ones, I must as definitely now warn them against any manifestation [88]of feeling or principle tending to break the unity of their home circles. They are bound to receive their father’s friends as their own, and to comply in all sweet and subjected ways with the wishes and habits of their parents; remaining calmly certain that the Law of God, for them, is that while they remain at home they shall be spirits of Peace and Humility beneath its roof. In all rightly ordered households, the confidence between the parent and child is such that in the event of a parent’s wish becoming contrary to a child’s feeling of its general duty, there would be no fear or discomfort on the child’s part in expressing its thoughts. The moment these are necessarily repressed, there is wrong somewhere; and in houses ordered according to the ways of modern fashionable life, there must be wrong, often, and everywhere. But the main curse of modern society is that, beginning by training its youth to be ‘independent’ and disobedient, this carefully cultivated independence shows itself, of course, by rejecting whatever is noble and honourable in their father’s houses, and never by healing or atoning what is faultful.

Of all St. George’s young Companions, therefore, he requires first the graces of gentleness and humility; nor, on the whole, much independent action of any kind; but only the quiet resolve to find out what is absolutely right, and so far as it may be kindly and inoffensively practised to fulfil it, at home; and so [89]far as it may be modestly and decorously uttered, to express the same abroad. And a well-bred young lady has always personal power enough of favour and discouragement, among persons of her own age, to satisfy the extremest demands of conscience in this direction.

And now let me see what room I have left for talk of present matters. Here is a piece printed a fortnight since, which I can’t be plagued to keep in type till next month.

Corpus Christi College, Oxford,
8th February, 1876.

I am fifty-seven to-day: and may perhaps be allowed to talk a little of myself.

Among several pretty love-letters from my pets, which only make me sorrier that I’m fifty-seven—but I really don’t think some of the letters could be nicer if I were only twenty-seven—there’s one with a ghost story in it, more precious to me than all the others, seeing I draw more quickly3 near, now, daily, to the Loyal land.

I may as well write it as I read, thus;

“I heard such a pretty story last night of something that happened at a school in Germany, not long since. It was the custom of one of the masters to go round every night to the dormitories to see that the boys were asleep, all right. One night he was astonished to see a lady go up to one of the boys, stoop over [90]him and kiss him, and then vanish. Next morning, news came that the mother of that particular boy had died at the time. Isn’t it lovely? Even A. believes that.”

Yes; and A. does wisely; and so may B., and C.: but yet I should much like to know what particular boy, in what particular school in Germany.

Nevertheless, the story has more value for me because it is written to me by a person who herself saw the shade—or rather light—of her sister, at the time of that sister’s death on the other side of the world; being a member of that branch of my family in which some gift of the Scottish second sight remains, inherited by my maternal grandmother, who ran away with my paternal grandfather when she was not quite sixteen; and my aunt Jessie, (my father’s only sister,) was born a year afterwards; a few weeks after which event, my grandmother, not yet seventeen, was surprised, (by a friend who came into her room unannounced,) dancing a threesome reel, with two chairs for her partners, she having found at the moment no other way of adequately expressing the pleasure she took in this mortal life, and its gifts, and promises.

The latter failed somewhat afterwards; and my aunt Jessie, a very precious and perfect creature, beautiful in her dark-eyed, Highland way; utterly religious, in her quiet Puritan way, and very submissive to Fates mostly unkind, married, or was married to—I never could [91]make out exactly which, or why,—a somewhat rough tanner, with a fairly good business, in the good town of Perth; and, when I was old enough to be taken first to visit them, as aforesaid, my aunt and my uncle the tanner lived in a good square-built gray stone house at the ‘Bridge-End’ of Perth, some fifty yards north of the bridge; their garden sloping steeply to the Tay, which eddied, three or four feet deep of sombre crystal, round the steps where the servants dipped their pails.

My aggrieved correspondent of Wakefield thought to cure me with her delicate ‘Fie,’ of what she supposed my coarse habit of sneering at people of no ancestry. I have it not; yet might have fallen into it in my youth, for I remember now, with more grief and shame than I can speak, being once ashamed of my own father and mother in Mr. Ryman’s shop here in Oxford; nor am I entirely at ease, at this moment, in writing of my uncles the baker and the tanner; yet my readers may trust me when I tell them, that in now remembering my dreams in the house of the entirely honest chief baker of Market Street, Croydon; and of Peter—not Simon—the tanner, whose house was by the riverside of Perth, I would not change the dreams, far less the tender realities, of those early days, for anything I hear now remembered by lords or dames, of their days of childhood in castle halls, and by sweet lawns and lakes in park-walled forest. [92]

I do not mean this for a republican sentiment; quite the opposite. I hate republicans, as I do all other manner of fools. I love Lords and Ladies, (especially unmarried ones, with beautiful three-syllabled Christian-names. I know a simple two-syllabled one, also, very charming); and Earls, and Countesses, and Marquises and Marchionesses, and Honourables, and Sirs; and I bow down before them and worship them, in the way that Mr. Thackeray thought ‘snobs’ did; he never perceiving with all the wit of him, (being mostly spent in mean smell-fungus work which spoiled its scent,) that it is himself the snob truly worships, all the time, and not the Lord he looks at. But my way of worship was Walter Scott’s, which my father taught me (always excepting such recreance as that in Mr. Ryman’s shop). And therefore, when I say I would not change my dreams of Market Street, and Bridge End, and Rose Terrace, (where we used to live after my uncle died, briefly apoplectic, at Bridge End,) for anything that the Palatial and Maxime-Pontifical abodes of Nobles and Bishops give them—I mean simply that I had a home, being a child, and loved it, and did not then, and do not now, covet my neighbour’s house;4 but cling to every likeness findable in these ruinous days to the places of peace given me in that lowly time.

Peace, and the knowledge of God it gave me. For, by the way, observe in that sacredest of benedictions, [93]which my Dean gave me in my own cathedral last Sunday, (I being an honorary student of Christ Church;—and there are only eight, if you please to look in the Oxford Calendar,) “The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God;”—observe, I say, for we do not always think of this, it is not the knowledge that is to give peace; but the peace which is to give knowledge; so that as long as we fast for strife and debate, and to smite with the fist of wickedness, and bite and devour one another, and are consumed one of another—every traveller paying an eight per cent. tax in his fare, for dividend to a consuming railroad company—we can’t know anything about God at all. And compare again ‘Eagle’s Nest,’ p. 194.

There, then, at Rose Terrace, I lived in peace in the fair Scotch summer days, with my widowed aunt, and my little cousin Jessie, then traversing a bright space between her sixth and ninth year; dark-eyed deeply, like her mother, and similarly pious; and she and I used to compete in the Sunday evening Scriptural examinations; and be as proud as two little peacocks because Jessie’s elder brothers, and sister Mary, used to get ‘put down,’ and either Jessie or I was always ‘Dux.’ We agreed upon this that we would be married, when we were a little older; not considering it preparatorily necessary to be in any degree wiser. [94]

9th February.

I couldn’t go on about my cousin Jessie, for I was interrupted by the second post with more birthday compliments, from young ladies now about Jessie’s age—letters which of course required immediate answer,—some also with flowers, which required to be immediately put into water, and greatly worried me by upsetting themselves among my books all day afterwards; but I let myself be worried, for love;—and, from a well-meaning and kindly feeling friend, some very respectful and respectable poetry, beautifully written, (and I read part of it, for love, but I had much rather he had sent me sixpence, for I hate poetry, mostly, and love pence, always); and to-day, half-past seven before chapel, my mind is otherwise set altogether, for I am reading Leviticus carefully now, for my life of Moses; and, in working out the law of the feast of harvest, chanced on the notable verse, xxiii. 24: “In the seventh month, in the first day of the month, shall ye have a Sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, an holy convocation;” and then flashed on me, all in a minute, the real meaning of Holbein’s introduction to the Dance of Death, (the third woodcut in the first edition), which till this moment I only took for his own symbol of the Triumph of Death, adopted from Orcagna and others, but which I see now, in an instant, to be the un-Holy Convocation; the gathering together to their temple of the Tribes of Death, and the blowing of trumpets on [95]their solemn feast day, and sabbath of rest to the weary in evil doing.

And, busy friends, in the midst of all your charming preparations for the Spring season, you will do well to take some method of seeing that design, and meditating, with its help, upon the grave question, what kind of weariness you will have to rest from. My own thoughts of it are disturbed, as I look, by that drummer-death, in front,5 with his rattling and ringing kettledrums (he the chief Musician in the Psalm for the sons of Korah—Dathan and Abiram, because his sounding is on Skin, with sticks of Bone,) not only because of my general interest in drummers, but because, after being much impressed, when I was a child, by the verses I had to learn about the last trump, out of the 15th of 1st Corinthians,—when I became a man, and put away childish things, I used often to wonder what we should all say of any sacred Saga among poor Indians whose untutored mind sees God in clouds, if it told them that they were all to rise from the dead at the sound of the last drum. [96]

And here I’m interrupted again by a delightful letter about the resurrection of snails, Atropos really managing matters, at present, like the daintiest and watchfullest housewife for me,—everything in its place, and under my hand.

“Dear Mr. Ruskin,—As I have just read the last part of February ‘Fors,’ I want to say what I know about the little shells—(Helix virgata—I suppose). I think—indeed, am pretty sure, nearly, if not quite—all those shells had little live snails in them. I have found them in quantities on the South Downs near Lewes, on Roundway Hill near Devizes, near Lyme Regis, in North Wales; and before any of those places, on our own Hampton Common in Gloucestershire, where my sisters and myself used to gather those and other pretty ones when we were children. If you have any stored by, in a few months I think you will find them (if not shut up) walk away.

“When I was a girl I once had to choose a birthday present from one of my aunts, and asked for ‘Turton’s British Shells,’ for I always wanted to know the name and history of everything I found; then I collected all the land and freshwater shells I could find, as I could not get sea shells—one of my longings—for I never saw the sea till after I was twenty, except for a few hours at Munsley in Norfolk, when I was eight years old. I have my little shells still; and have four or five varieties of Helix virgata: I think the number of rings increases as the shell goes on growing.

‘In the autumn these shells are often suddenly observed in such great numbers as to give rise to the popular notion of their having fallen from the clouds. This shell is very hardy, and appears nearly insensible to cold, as it does not hybernate even when the ground is covered with snow.’ [97]

“I always fancied the Lord let them lie about in such numbers to be food for some little birds, or may be rooks and starlings, robins, etc., in cold weather when there was so little to eat.

“I dare say you know how the blackbirds and thrushes eat the larger snails. I have often seen in the woods a very pretty coloured shell lying on a white stone,—the birds had put it there to crack a hole in it and to take out the snail. The shell looked such a pretty clear colour because it was alive, and yet empty.”

Yes; the Holy Ghost of Life, not yet finally departed, can still give fair colours even to an empty shell. Evangelical friends,—worms, as you have long called yourselves, here is a deeper expression of humility suggested possible: may not some of you be only painted shells of worms,—alive, yet empty?

Assuming my shell to be Helix virgata, I take down my magnificent French—(let me see if I can write its title without a mistake)—“Manuel de Conchyliologie et de Paléontologie Conchyliologique,” or, in English, “Manual of Shell-talking and Old-body-talking in a Shell-talking manner.” Eight hundred largest octavo—more like folio—pages of close print, with four thousand and odd (nearly five thousand) exquisite engravings of shells; and among them I look for the creatures elegantly, but inaccurately, called by modern naturalists Gasteropods; in English, Belly-feet, (meaning, of course, to say Belly-walkers, for they haven’t got any feet); and among these I find, with much pains, one that is rather like mine, of which I am told that it belongs to the sixteenth sort in the second tribe of [98]the second family of the first sub-order of the second order of the Belly-walkers, and that it is called ‘Adeorbis subcarinatus,’—Adeorbis by Mr. Wood, and subcarinatus by Mr. Montagu; but I am not told where it is found, nor what sort of creature lives in it, nor any single thing whatever about it, except that it is “sufficiently depressed” (“assez déprimée”), and “deeply enough navelled” (assez profondement ombiliquée,—but how on earth can I tell when a shell is navelled to a depth, in the author’s opinion, satisfactory?) and that the turns (taken by the family), are ‘little numerous’ (peu nombreux). On the whole, I am not disposed to think my shell is here described, and put my splendid book in its place again.

I next try my English Cuvier, in sixteen octavo volumes; in which I find no notice whatever taken of these minor snails, except a list of thirty-three species, finishing with an etc.; out of which I mark ‘Cretacea,’ ‘Terrestris,’ and ‘Nivea,’ as perhaps likely to fit mine; and then I come, by order of Atropos, on this amazing account of the domestic arrangements of a little French snail, “Helix decollata” (Guillotined snail?) with references to “Cm. Chemn. cxxxvi. 1254–1257,” a species which “has the singular habit of successively fracturing the whorls at the top, (origin, that is,—snails building their houses from heaven towards earth,) of the spire, so that at a particular epoch, of all the whorls of the spire originally possessed by this bulimus, not a single [99]one remains.” Bulimus,—what’s a bulimus? Helix is certainly a screw, and bulimus—in my Riddle’s dictionary—is said to be “empty-bellied.” Then this French snail, revolutionary in the manner of a screw, appears to be a belly-walker with an empty belly, and no neck,—who literally “breaks up” his establishment every year! Query—breaks? or melts? Contraction or confusion?

I must put my fine English book back in its place, too;—but here, at last, comes a ‘work of light’ to help us, from my favourite pupil, who was out with me that day on the Downs, and nearly killed himself with keeping a fox in sight on foot, up and down them;—happily surviving, he has pursued the slower creature for me to its cave of silver earth; and writes thus.

“I have sent you two little boxes—one containing common garden snail shells of various ages, and the other black striped Down shells; and you will see that in Box 1 the full-grown ones, with the strong finished lip, have four whorls each, and all the full-grown garden shells I have noticed had the same number, though they varied a little in size. The next largest in the box have only three and a half turns, but if they had lived longer they would have added on another half turn, bigger than all the [100]rest of the shell put together. In fact, if one looks at this shell, one sees that any half whorl is half as large again as all the rest of the shell before it. Then, besides these, there are four or five younger shells, the smallest of which has only two and a half whorls, which exactly correspond to two and a half whorls taken from any of the larger shells; so I think we may conclude that a shell grows by adding on length only to the large end of a tapering tube, like a dunce’s cap, which, however, is curled up like a ram’s horn, to look prettier, take up less room, and allow the occupant to beat a retreat round the corner when a robin comes. By-the-bye, I wonder some birds don’t grow bills like corkscrews, to get at the snails with.

“Then in box No. 2 there are several black striped Down shells, and the full-grown ones have six whorls, and the smallest ones, which died young, some four and some five, according to age; but the dunce’s cap is longer, and so there are more whorls.

“I couldn’t get these facts clearly stated in two handbooks which I read. I suppose they took it for granted that one knew; but I found, what after all would lead one to infer the rest, that the young snail at birth corresponds to the colourless APEX of the shell, and that the colour only comes in that part which grows under the influence of light and air.”

“Wednesday, Feb. 9.

“Another fact is, that all the shells I ever remember looking at grow in the direction of the sun.

“Another fact. Since the shells have been in this room, my chimneypiece has been full of sleepy, small, long-bodied spiders, which had gone to sleep for the winter in these black and white caverns, out of the reach of flocks of half-starved larks and starlings.”

I drew the three advancing stages of the common snail’s houses, thus sent me, forthwith; and Mr. Burgess [101]swiftly and rightly engraves them. Note that the apparent irregularities in the spirals are conditions of perspective, necessarily affecting the deeply projecting forms; note also that each whorl is partly hidden by the subsequent one, built with its edge lapping over it; and finally, that there is really, I believe, a modification, to some extent, and enlargement, of the inner whorls; until the domestic creature is satisfied with its length of cave, and expresses its rest in accomplished labour and full age, by putting that binding lip round its border, and term to its hope.

Wherein, building for the earth, we may wisely imitate it. Of other building, not with slime for mortar, yet heavenward, we may perhaps conceive in due time.

I beg all my readers, but especially my Companions, to read with their best care the paper by Mr. Girdlestone, which, by the author’s kindly gift, I am enabled to send them with this Fors. It is the most complete and logical statement of Economic truth, in the points it touches, that I have ever seen in the English language: and to master it will be the best possible preparation for the study of personal duties to which I shall invite my Companions in my next letter. [103]

I. Affairs of the Company.

I give below our banker’s account to the end of last year, drawn up by my friend Mr. W. Walker, whom I asked to take salary as the Company’s accountant, but who, as will be seen by the part of his letter I take leave here to print, gives us his work in true sympathy.

18, Yonge Park, Holloway, N., Nov. 11th, 1875.

Dear Sir,—I am of the same opinion as your printseller, and agree with him that “it is delightful to do business with you,”—so you must please let me volunteer to be of any practical service so far as keeping accounts, etc., can be useful to you or the St. George’s Company.

I readily accept the duties as honorary but not titled accountant, and as the labour is light, entailing very little trouble, my reward shall be the self-satisfaction in thinking I have done very little in the cause wherein you have done and are doing so very much.

Nevertheless, your kindly worded offer was gratefully received, and I was really pleased.

The enclosed accounts are a mere copy of the ledger items. I would have put all the names of the donors, (I found a few,) but you have a record, if I may judge from the notices in the December number of ‘Fors.’

With sincere respect, yours faithfully,

John Ruskin, Esq., LL.D. Wm. Walker.

[104]

[107]

II. Affairs of the Master.1

(a) Insurance on £15,000 worth of drawings and books in my rooms at Oxford. [108]

(b) Particulars of this account to be afterwards given; my Oxford assistant having just lost his wife, and been subjected to unusual expenses.

(c) My present valet, a delightful old German, on temporary service.

(d) Present, on my birthday, of a silk frock to one of my pets. It became her very nicely; but I think there was a little too much silk in the flounces.

(e) My good doctor at Coniston. Had to drive over from Hawkshead every other winter day, because I wouldn’t stop drinking too much tea—also my servants were ill.

(f) About four times this sum will keep me comfortably—all the year round—here among my Oxford friends—when I have reduced myself to the utmost allowable limit of a St. George’s Master’s income—366 pounds a year, (the odd pound for luck).

(g) For copies of the Book of Kells, bought of a poor artist. Very beautiful, and good for gifts to St. George.

(h) My honest host (happily falsifying his name), for friends when I haven’t houseroom, etc. This bill chiefly for hire of carriages.

(i) Downs shall give account of himself in next Fors.

(k)

[109]

I will begin my letter to-day with our Bible lesson, out of which other necessary lessons will spring. We must take the remaining three sons of Ham together, in relation to each other and to Israel.

Mizraim, the Egyptian; Phut, the Ethiopian; Sidon, the Sidonian: or, in breadth of meaning the three African powers,—A, of the watered plain, B, of the desert, and C, of the sea; the latter throning itself on the opposite rocks of Tyre, and returning to culminate in Carthage.

A. Egypt is essentially the Hamite slavish strength of body and intellect.

B. Ethiopia, the Hamite slavish affliction of body and intellect; condemnation of the darkened race that can no more change its skin than the leopard its spots; yet capable, in its desolation of nobleness. Read the “What doth hinder me to be baptized?—If thou believest with all thine heart thou mayest” of the [110]Acts; and after that the description in the ‘Daily Telegraph’ (first Monday of March), of the Nubian king, with his sword and his Bible at his right hand, and the tame lioness with her cubs, for his playmates, at his left.

C. Tyre is the Hamite slavish pleasure of sensual and idolatrous art, clothing her nakedness with sea purple. She is lady of all beautiful carnal pride, and of the commerce that feeds it,—her power over the Israelite being to beguile, or help for pay, as Hiram.

But Ethiopia and Tyre are always connected with each other: Tyre, the queen of commerce; Ethiopia, her gold-bringing slave; the redemption of these being Christ’s utmost victory. “They of Tyre, with the Morians—there, even there, was He born.” “Then shall princes come out of Egypt, and Ethiopia stretch forth her hands unto God.” “He shall let go my captives, not for price; and the labour of Egypt, and merchandise of Ethiopia, shall come over unto thee, and shall be thine.”1

Learn now after the fifteenth, also the sixteenth verse of Genesis x., and read the fifteenth chapter with extreme care. If you have a good memory, learn it by heart from beginning to end; it is one of the most sublime and pregnant passages in the entire compass of ancient literature. [111]

Then understand generally that the spiritual meaning of Egyptian slavery is labour without hope, but having all the reward, and all the safety, of labour absolute. Its beginning is to discipline and adorn the body,—its end is to embalm the body; its religion is first to restrain, then to judge, “whatsoever things are done in the body, whether they be good or evil.” Therefore, whatever may be well done by measure and weight,—what force may be in geometry, mechanism, and agriculture, bodily exercise, and dress; reverent esteem of earthly birds, and beasts, and vegetables; reverent preparation of pottage, good with flesh;—these shall Egypt teach and practise, to her much comfort and power. “And when Jacob heard that there was corn in Egypt, he called his sons.”

And now remember the scene at the threshing floor of Atad (Gen. 50th, 10 and 11).

“A grievous mourning.” They embalmed Jacob. They put him in a coffin. They dutifully bore him home, for his son’s sake. Whatsoever may well be done of earthly deed, they do by him and his race. And the end of it all, for them, is a grievous mourning.

Then, for corollary, remember,—all fear of death, and embalming of death, and contemplating of death, and mourning for death, is the pure bondage of Egypt.

And whatsoever is formal, literal, miserable, material, in the deeds of human life, is the preparatory bondage of Egypt; of which, nevertheless, some formalism, some [112]literalism, some misery, and some flesh-pot comfort, will always be needful for the education of such beasts as we are. So that, though, when Israel was a child, God loved him, and called his son out of Egypt, He preparatorily sent him into Egypt. And the first deliverer of Israel had to know the wisdom of Egypt before the wisdom of Arabia; and for the last deliverer of Israel, the dawn of infant thought, and the first vision of the earth He came to save, was under the palms of Nile.

Now, therefore, also for all of us, Christians in our nascent state of muddy childhood, when Professor Huxley is asking ironically, ‘Has a frog a soul?’ and scientifically directing young ladies to cut out frogs’ stomachs to see if they can find it,—whatsoever, I say, in our necessary education among that scientific slime of Nile, is formal, literal, miserable, and material, is necessarily Egyptian.

As, for instance, brickmaking, scripture, flogging, and cooking,—upon which four heads of necessary art I take leave to descant a little.

And first of brickmaking. Every following day the beautiful arrangements of modern political economists, obeying the law of covetousness instead of the law of God, send me more letters from gentlemen and ladies asking me ‘how they are to live’?

Well, my refined friends, you will find it needful to live, if it be with success, according to God’s Law; and to love that law, and make it your meditation all [113]the day. And the first uttered article in it is, “In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread.”

“But you don’t really expect us to work with our hands, and make ourselves hot?”

Why, who, in the name of Him who made you, are you then, that you shouldn’t? Have you got past the flaming sword, back into Eden; and is your celestial opinion there that we miserable Egyptians are to work outside, here, for your dinners, and hand them through the wall to you at a tourniquet? or, as being yet true servants of the devil, while you are blessed, dish it up to you, spiritually hot, through a trap-door?

Fine anti-slavery people you are, forsooth! who think it is right not only to make slaves, but accursed slaves, of other people, that you may slip your dainty necks out of the collar!

“Ah, but we thought Christ’s yoke had no collar!”

It is time to know better. There may come a day, indeed, when there shall be no more curse;—in the meantime, you must be humble and honest enough to take your share of it.

So what can you do, that’s useful? Not to ask too much at first; and, since we are now coming to particulars, addressing myself first to gentlemen,—Do you think you can make a brick, or a tile?

You rather think not? Well, if you are healthy, and fit for work, and can do nothing better,—go and learn. [114]

You would rather not? Very possibly: but you can’t have your dinner unless you do. And why would you so much rather not?

“So ungentlemanly!”

No; to beg your dinner, or steal it, is ungentlemanly. But there is nothing ungentlemanly, that I know of, in beating clay, and putting it in a mould.

“But my wife wouldn’t like it!”

Well, that’s a strong reason: you shouldn’t vex your wife, if you can help it; but why will she be vexed? If she is a nice English girl, she has pretty surely been repeating to herself, with great unction, for some years back, that highly popular verse,—

And this, which I recommend, is not a trivial round, but an important square, of human business; and will certainly supply any quantity of room to deny yourselves in; and will bring you quite as near God as, for instance, writing lawyers’ letters to make appointments, and charging five shillings each for them. The only difference will be that, instead of getting five shillings for writing a letter, you will only get it for a day and a half’s sweat of the brow.

“Oh, but my wife didn’t mean that sort of ‘common task’ at all!” [115]

No; but your wife didn’t know what she meant; neither did Mr. Keble. Women and clergymen have so long been in the habit of using pretty words without ever troubling themselves to understand them, that they now revolt from the effort, as if it were an impiety. So far as your wife had any meaning at all, it was that until she was made an angel of, and had nothing to do but be happy, and sing her flattering opinions of God for evermore,—dressing herself and her children becomingly, and leaving cards on her acquaintances, were sufficiently acceptable services to Him, for which trivial though they were, He would reward her with immediate dinner, and everlasting glory. That was your wife’s real notion of the matter, and modern Christian women’s generally, so far as they have got any notions at all under their bonnets, and the skins of the dead robins they have stuck in them,—the disgusting little savages. But that is by no means the way in which either your hands are to be delivered from making the pots, or her head from carrying them.

Oh, but you will do it by deputy, and by help of capital, will you? Here is the Grand Junction Canal Brick, Tile, and Sanitary Pipe Company, Limited; Capital, £50,000, in 10,000 shares of £5 each; “formed for the purpose of purchasing and working an estate comprising fifty-eight acres of land known as the ‘Millpost Field,’ and ‘The Duddles,’ situate at Southall, in the county of Middlesex.” You will sit at home, serene [116]proprietor, not able, still less willing, to lift so much as a spadeful of Duddles yourself; but you will feed a certain number of brickmaking Ethiopian slaves thereon, as cheap as you can; and teach them to make bricks, as basely as they can; and you will put the meat out of their mouths into your own, and provide for their eternal salvation by gracious ministries from Uxbridge. A clerical friend of mine in that neighbourhood has, I hear, been greatly afflicted concerning the degenerate natures of brickmakers. Let him go and make, and burn, a pile or two with his own hands; he will thereby receive apocalyptic visions of a nature novel to his soul. And if he ever succeeds in making one good brick, (the clay must lie fallow in wind and sun two years before you touch it, my master Carlyle tells me,) he will have done a good deed for his generation which will be acknowledged in its day by the Stone of Israel, when the words of many a sermon will be counted against their utterers, every syllable as mere insolent breaking of the third commandment.

In the meantime, it seems that no gracious ministries from Uxbridge, or elsewhere, can redeem this untoward generation of brickmakers. Like the navvies of Furness, (Letter XI., p. 5,) they are a fallen race, fit for nothing but to have dividends got out of them, and then be damned. My fine-lady friends resign themselves pacifically to that necessity, though greatly excited, I perceive, at present, concerning vivisection. In which [117]warmth of feeling they are perfectly right, if they would only also remember that England is spending some thirty millions of pounds a year in making machines for the vivisection, not of dogs, but men; nor is this expenditure at all for anatomical purposes; but, in the real root of it, merely to maintain the gentlemanly profession of the Army, and the ingenious profession of Engineers.

Oh, but we don’t want to live by soldiering, any more than by brickmaking; behold, we are intellectual persons, and wish to live by literature.

Well, it is a slavish trade,—true Hamite; nevertheless, if we will learn our elements in true Egyptian bondage, some good may come of it.

For observe, my literary friends, the essential function of the slavish Egyptian, in the arts of the world, is to lose the picture in the letter; as the essential function of the Eleutherian Goth is to illuminate the letter into the picture.

The Egyptian is therefore the scribe of scribes,—the supremely literary person of earth. The banks of Nile give him his rock volume: the reeds of Nile his paper roll. With cleaving chisel, and cloven reed, he writes thereon, exemplarily: the ark which his princess found among the paper reeds, is the true beginning of libraries,—Alexandrian, and all other. What you call Scripture, in special, coming out of it; the first portion written in Egyptian manner, (it is [118]said,) with the finger of God. Scribe and lawyer alike have too long forgotten the lesson,—come now and learn it again, of Theuth, with the ibis beak.2

When next you are in London on a sunny morning, take leisure to walk into the old Egyptian gallery of the British Museum, after traversing which for a third of its length, you will find yourself in the midst of a group of four massy sarcophagi,—two on your left, two on your right. Assume that they are represented by the letters below, and that you are walking in the direction of the arrow, so that you have the sarcophagi A and B on your left, and the sarcophagi C and D on your right.

In my new Elements of Drawing, I always letter the corners of a square all round thus, so that A C is always the diagonal, A B the upright side on the left, and A D the base.

The sarcophagus A is a king’s; B, a scribe’s; C, a queen’s; and D, a priest’s.

A is of a grand basaltic rock with veins full of agates, and white onyx,—the most wonderful piece of crag I know; B and C are of grey porphyry; D of red granite.

The official information concerning sarcophagus A, (Nectabenes,) is to the effect that it dates from the 30th dynasty, or about 380 B.C.

B, (Hapimen,) of the 26th dynasty, or about 525. [119]

C, (the Queen’s,) of the same dynasty and period.

D, (Naskatu,) of the 27th dynasty, or about 500 B.C.

The three sarcophagi, then, B, C, and D, were, (we are told,) cut exactly at the time when, beyond the North Sea, Greek art, just before Marathon, was at its grandest.

And if you look under the opened lid of the queen’s, you will see at the bottom of it the outline portrait, or rather symbol, of her, engraved, with the hawk for her crest, signifying what hope of immortality or power after death remained to her.

But the manner of the engraving you must observe. This is all that the Egyptian Holbein could do on stone, after a thousand years at least of practised art; while the Greeks, who had little more than begun only two hundred years before, were already near to the strength of carving their Theseus, perfect for all time.

This is the Hamite bondage in Art: of which the causes will teach themselves to us as we work, ourselves. Slavery is good for us in the beginning, and for writing-masters we can find no better than these Mizraimites: see what rich lines of Scripture they are, along the black edges of those tombs. To understand at all how well they are done, we must at once begin to do the like, in some sort ourselves.

By the exercise given in Fors of January, if you have practised it, you have learned something of what [120]is meant by merit and demerit in a pure line, however produced. We must now consider of our tools a little.

You can make a mark upon things in three ways—namely, by scratching them, painting on them with a brush, or letting liquid run on them out of a pen. Pencil or chalk marks are merely a kind of coarse painting with dry material.

The primitive and simplest mark is the scratch or cut, which shall be our first mode of experiment. Take a somewhat blunt penknife, and a composition candle; and scratch or cut a fine line on it with the point of the knife, drawing the sharp edge of the knife towards you.

Examine the trace produced through a magnifying glass, and you will find it is an angular ditch with a little ridge raised at its side, or sides, pressed out of it.

Next, scratch the candle with the point of the knife, turning the side of the blade forwards: you will now cut a broader furrow, but the wax or composition will rise out of it before the knife in a beautiful spiral shaving, formed like the most lovely little crimped or gathered frill; which I’ve been trying to draw, but can’t; and if you can, you will be far on the way to drawing spiral staircases, and many other pretty things.

Nobody, so far as I have myself read, has yet clearly explained why a wood shaving, or continuously driven [121]portion of detached substance, should thus take a spiral course; nor why a substance like wax or water, capable of yielding to pressure, should rise or fall under a steady force in successive undulations. Leaving these questions for another time, observe that the first furrow, with the ridge at its side, represents the entire group of incised lines ploughed in soft grounds, the head of them all being the plough furrow itself. And the line produced by the flat side of the knife is the type of those produced by complete excision, the true engraver’s.

Next, instead of wax, take a surface of wood, and, drawing first as deep and steady a furrow in it as you can with the edge of the knife, proceed to deepen it by successive cuts.

You will, of course, find that you must cut from the two sides, sloping to the middle, forming always a deeper angular ditch; but you will have difficulty in clearing all out neatly at the two ends.

And if you think of it, you will perceive that the simplest conceivable excision of a clear and neat kind must be that produced by three cuts given triangularly.3 For though you can’t clear out the hollow with two touches, you need not involve yourself in the complexity of four. [122]

And unless you take great pains in keeping the three sides of this triangle equal, two will be longer than the third. So the type of the primitive incised mark is what grand persons call ‘cuneiform’—wedge-shaped.

If you cut five such cuneiform incisions in a star group, thus, with a little circle connecting them in the middle, you will have the element of the decorative upper border both on the scribe’s coffin and the queen’s. You will also have an elementary picture of a starfish—or the portrait of the pentagonal and absorbent Adam and Eve who were your ancestors, according to Mr. Darwin.

You will see, however, on the sarcophagi that the rays are not equidistant, but arranged so as to express vertical position,—of that afterwards; to-day observe only the manner of their cutting; and then on a flat surface of porphyry,—do the like yourself.

You don’t know what porphyry is—nor where to get it? Write to Mr. Tennant, 149, Strand, and he will send you a little bit as cheap as he can. Then you must get a little vice to fix it, and a sharp-pointed little chisel, and a well-poised little hammer; and, when you have cut your asterisk, you will know more about Egypt than nine hundred and ninety-nine people out of a thousand,—Oxford scholars and all. Awaiting the result [123]of your experiment, I proceed to the other instrument of writing, the reed, or pen.

Of which the essential power is that it can make a narrow stroke sideways, and a broad one when you press it open.

Now our own current writing, I told you, is to be equal in thickness of line. You will find that method the quickest and servicablest. But in quite beautiful writing, the power of the pen is to be exhibited with decision; and of its purest and delicatest exertion, you will see the result on the opposite page; facsimile by Mr. Burgess, coloured afterwards by hand, from a piece of Lombardic writing, of about the eleventh century,—(I shall not say where the original is, because I don’t want it to be fingered)—which the scribe has entirely delighted in doing, and of which every line and touch is perfect in its kind. Copy it, with what precision you can, (and mind how you put in the little blue dash to thicken the s of Fides,) for in its perfect uprightness, exquisite use of the diamond-shaped touches obtained by mere pressure on the point, and reserved administration of colour, it is a model not to be surpassed; standing precisely half-way between old Latin letters and mediæval Gothic. The legend of it is—

Towards the better understanding of which Catholic [124]faith, another step may be made, if you will, by sending to Mr. Ward for the Etruscan Leucothea,4 with Dionysus on her knees, which also stands just half-way in imagination, though only a quarter of the way in time, between the Egyptian Madonna, (Isis with Horus,) of fifteen hundred years before Christ, and the Florentine Madonna by Lippi, fifteen hundred years after Christ. Lippi, being true-bred Etruscan, simply raises the old sculpture into pure and sacred life, retaining all its forms, even to the spiral of the throne ornament, and the transgression of the figures on the bordering frame, acknowledging, in this subjection to the thoughts and laws of his ancestors, a nobler Catholic Faith than Athanasius wrote: faith, namely, in that one Lord by whose breath, from the beginning of creation, the children of men are born; and into whose hands, dying, they give up their spirit.

This photograph of Etruscan art is therefore to be the second of our possessions, and means of study; affording us at once elements of art-practice in many directions, according to our strength; and as we began with drawing the beads of cap, and spiral of chair, in the Lippi, rather than the Madonna, so here it will be well to be sure we can draw the throne, before we try the Leucothea. Outline it first by the eye, then trace the original, to correct your drawing; and by the time [125]next Fors comes out, I hope your power of drawing a fine curve, like that of the back of this throne, will be materially increased; by that time also I shall have got spirals to compare with these Etruscan ones, drawn from shells only an hour or two old, sent me by my good friend Mr. Sillar, (who taught me the wrongness of the infinite spiral of money interest,) by which I am at present utterly puzzled, finding our conclusions in last Fors on this point of zoology quite wrong; and that the little snails have no less twisted houses than the large. But neither for drawing nor architecture is there to-day more time, but only to correct and clarify my accounts, which I have counted a little too far on my power of keeping perspicuous without trouble; and have thereby caused my subscribers and myself a good deal more than was needful.

Henceforward I must ask their permission, unless I receive definite instruction to the contrary, to give names in full, as the subscriptions come in, and give up our occult notation.

I am not quite so well pleased with my good friend Mr. Girdlestone’s pamphlet on luxury as I was with that on classification of society, though I am heartily glad to be enabled by him to distribute it to my readers, for its gentle statements may be more convincing than my impatient ones. But I must protest somewhat against their mildness. It is not now merely dangerous, but criminal, to teach the lie that the poor [126]live by the luxury of the rich. Able men—even Pope himself—have been betrayed into thinking so in old times, (blaming the luxury, however, no less,) but the assertion is now made by no intelligent person, unless with the deliberate purpose of disguising abuses on which all the selfish interests of society depend.

I have to acknowledge a quite magnificent gift of Japanese inlaid work to our Sheffield Museum, from my kind friend Mr. Henry Willett, of Arnold House, Brighton. A series of some fifty pieces was offered by him for our selection: but I have only accepted a tithe of them, thinking that the fewer examples of each school we possess, the better we shall learn from them. Three out of the five pieces I have accepted are of quite unsurpassable beauty, and the two others of extreme interest. They are sent to the Curator at Sheffield. [127]

I. Affairs of the Company.

I give on next two pages our banker’s account to 14th March of this year. Calling this ‘Account B,’ and that given to the end of last year, in last Fors, ‘Account A,’ the following abstract of both is, I hope, accurate.

Of the cheques for £800 I will give account presently; but first, we must compare the cash paid in with the subscription list.

Now see subscription list, after banker’s account, page 129. [128]

[129]

Now continuing the list.

The sum in my hands, thus amounting to £ 845 19s. 9d., has been distributed as follows:—

[130]

Messrs. Tarrant and Mackrell’s accounts follow. I had an offer from Sheffield to do this legal work for nothing; but I wanted to be sure that everything was in due form, and I can trust this London firm. My very good friend Mr. Tarrant must, however, pardon my pointing out to him how much more pleasantly, for all parties, he might be employed, as suggested in Fors XVI., pages 10 and 11, than in taxing this transfer of property to the amount of nearly fifty pounds—(seven pounds odd worth of letters merely). For, were the members of the legal profession employed generally in illuminating initials, and so got out of our way, and the lands of the country properly surveyed and fenced, all that would be really needful for the sale of any portion of them by anybody to anybody else, would be the entry in a roll recording the tenure of so many square miles round each principal town. “The piece of land hitherto belonging to A B, is this day sold to and henceforward belongs to C D, whereof we (city magistrate and a head of any county family) are witnesses.”

THE ST. GEORGE’S COMPANY,
To TARRANT & MACKRELL,

Costs of Purchase of Freehold Land and Messuage in Bell Hagg Road, Sheffield.

THE ST. GEORGE’S COMPANY,
To Wm. B. TARRANT.

General Bill of Costs to 10th December, 1875.

[135]

To TARRANT & MACKRELL.

II. Affairs of the Master.

[137]

III.

“6, Moira Place, Southampton, 15th Feb., 1876.

“Dear Sir,—On referring to Helix ericetorum (the species I take your outline to be enlarged from) in Dr. Turton’s British Land and Fresh-water Shells, with additions by Dr. Gray, I find it stated, on the authority of M. Bouchard, that the eggs of H. ericetorum are laid from July to November, and are from forty to sixty in number, the time of hatching being twenty days after laying, and the length of the snail’s life is eighteen months. It is not, however, stated whether these particulars refer to H. ericetorum in England or France.

“The only extra information I can get from my other book is that heavy rains kill great numbers of them. [138]

“Your drawing refers to the shell of a full-grown snail, shown by its having six whorls, and by the slight reflex curve at the outer end of the spiral.1

“With regard to the formation of the shell, I can state that it was formed by successive additions during the life of the snail, the small dark transparent portion in the centre of the spiral being the nucleus, and the lines and ridges crossing the spiral indicate the different rings or layers of shell added to suit the convenience of the snail.

“I enclose specimens of H. ericetorum from Deal,2 to enable you to compare them with those from Arundel, to make sure that they are the same species.

“I am, dear Sir, your obedient servant,

“H. L.”

IV. “A Swedish newspaper contains a lengthy account of the gallant rescue of a Swedish steamer by the people of the village of Cresswell, Northumberland. Thirteen out of the fifteen male inhabitants manned the boat, to launch which the women waded to their waists. A fisher-girl named Bella Brown ran ten miles to the next lifeboat station for assistance, and had to wade through several bays on an icy January night. The brave girl was seized with cramp on returning, and nearly lost her life.”

V. Part of a letter from one of my best friends, Fellow and Tutor of Corpus, communicating some recent notes on English scenery:—

“I next went to the Isle of Wight, which is very pretty, but all over-builded. It threatens soon to become a mere suburb of London. Portsmouth detained me a day,—all too brief a time [139]for its beauties and horrors, its relics of past naval glories and picturesque bits on land and sea, its nightmare sea-going caldrons, misnamed men-of-war, at the present. I went on board the Thunderer, twin ship of the Devastation. I had expected something ugly and horrible, both inside and out; but my expectations were surpassed tenfold, especially with regard to the inside of the ship. The crew are confined altogether in utterly dark dungeons at each end of the ship, wholly under water, and hardly high enough for a man to walk in upright. An iron-shielded and very high deck in the middle of the ship is the only place where a man can see the light of day, and live when this witch’s kettle is at sea, as the ends of the vessel cut under the waves. The bull of Phalaris would have been an eligible prison to me in comparison of this; victims, at any rate, were not sent to sea in it.”

VI.

“Laxey, Isle of Man, March 4th, 1876.

“Dear Sir,—In this month’s ‘Fors,’ page 107—‘Affairs of the Master,’—if you add up the amounts paid out, I think you will find, instead of £360 2s. 0d., the amount should be £370 2s. 3d., and leaves a proper balance of £225 5s. 6d.

“I hope you will not be offended at me for troubling you with these trifling errors, of no moment; but I have got a singular habit—that I can never pass over a column of added figures, no matter what length, without testing their correctness.

“Yours truly,

“E. Rydings.”

(If only my good correspondent—now a Companion—will indulge himself constantly in this good habit as respects the Fors accounts, I shall be much more at ease about them. But his postscript is more important.)

“P.S. You say that the girls of St. George’s Company shall learn to spin and weave, etc. There is a good deal of hand-spinning [140]done on this little island, but I am sorry to say that there are no young girls learning now to spin; and in a few years more, the common spinning wheel here will be as great a curiosity as it is in Lancashire, where one is never seen—only at the theatre. I have gone to some little trouble to ascertain why the young girls are not learning now to spin; and the principal reason I can gather is that home-spun ‘Manks-made dresses,’ as they are called, last too long, and therefore do not give the young women a chance of having four or five new dresses in the year. I could give you some interesting information about hand-spinning and weaving here, but must reserve it for another time, and will send you patterns of cloth, etc. All our blankets, sheets, flannels, skirts, jacket cloth, stockings, and yarns, have been spun by my wife and her mother before her. We have now linen sheets in wear, not a hole or a tear in them, that were spun by my wife’s mother,—and she, poor body, has been dead twenty-eight or twenty-nine years,—the flax grown on their own farm. Fine and white they are, and would compare favourably in fineness with machine-made Irish linen. The daughters of Lord Auckland, when he was bishop here, used to go every Saturday afternoon to my wife’s mother’s, (who lived just behind Bishop Court,) to learn to spin.

“But I must write you a special letter on the subject when I have got my patterns ready.”

[141]

I told you in last Fors to learn the 15th chapter of Genesis by heart. Too probably, you have done nothing of the sort; but, at any rate, let us now read it together, that I may tell you, of each verse, what I wanted, (and still beg,) you to learn it for.

1. “The word of God came to Abram.” Of course you can’t imagine such a thing as that the word of God should ever come to you? Is that because you are worse, or better, than Abram?—because you are a more, or less, civilized person than he? I leave you to answer that question for yourself;—only, as I have told you often before, but cannot repeat too often, find out first what the Word is; and don’t suppose that the printed thing in your hand, which you call a Bible, is the Word of God, and that the said Word may therefore always be bought at a pious stationer’s for eighteen-pence.

Farther, in the “Explanatory and Critical Commentary and Revision of the Translation” (of the [142]Holy Bible) by Bishops and other Clergy of the Established Church, published in 1871, by Mr. John Murray, you will find the interesting statement, respecting this verse, that “This is the first time that the expression—so frequent afterwards—‘the Word of the Lord’ occurs in the Bible.” The expression is certainly rather frequent afterwards; and one might have perhaps expected from the Episcopal and clerical commentators, on this, its first occurrence, some slight notice of the probable meaning of it. They proceed, however, without farther observation, to discuss certain problems, suggested to them by the account of Abram’s vision, respecting somnambulism; on which, though one would have thought few persons more qualified than themselves to give an account of that condition, they arrive at no particular conclusion.

But even their so carefully limited statement is only one-third true. It is true of the Hebrew Law; not of the New Testament:—of the entire Bible, it is true of the English version only; not of the Latin, nor the Greek. Nay, it is very importantly and notably untrue of those earlier versions.

There are three words in Latin, expressive of utterance in three very different manners; namely, ‘verbum,’ a word, ‘vox,’ a voice, and ‘sermo,’ a sermon.

Now, in the Latin Bible, when St. John says “the Word was in the beginning,” he says, the ‘Verbum’ was in the beginning. But here, when somebody [143](nobody knows who, and that is a bye question of some importance,) is represented as saying, “The word of the Lord came to Abram,” what somebody really says, is that “There was made to Abram a ‘Sermon’ of the Lord.”

Does it not seem possible that one of the almost unconscious reasons of your clergy for not pointing out this difference in expression, may be a doubt whether you ought not rather to desire to hear God preach, than them?

But the Latin word ‘verbum,’ from which you get ‘verbal’ and ‘verbosity,’ is a very obscure and imperfect rendering of the great Greek word ‘Logos,’ from which you get ‘logic,’ and ‘theology,’ and all the other logies.

And the phrase “word of the Lord,” which the Bishops, with unusual episcopic clairvoyance, have really observed to ‘occur frequently afterwards’ in the English Bible, is, in the Greek Bible always “the Logos of the Lord.” But this Sermon to Abraham is only ‘rhema,’ an actual or mere word; in his interpretation of which, I see, my good Dean of Christ Church quotes the Greek original of Sancho’s proverb, “Fair words butter no parsneps.” Which we shall presently see to have been precisely Abram’s—(of course cautiously expressed)—feeling, on this occasion. But to understand his feeling, we must look what this sermon of the Lord’s was. [144]

The sermon (as reported), was kind, and clear. “Fear not, Abram, I am thy Shield, and thy exceeding great Reward,” (‘reward’ being the poetical English of our translators—the real phrase being ‘thy exceeding great pay, or gain’). Meaning, “You needn’t make an iron tent, with a revolving gun in the middle of it, for I am your tent and artillery in one; and you needn’t care to get a quantity of property, for I am your property; and you needn’t be stiff about your rights of property, because nobody will dispute your right to Me.”

To which Abram answers, “Lord God, what wilt Thou give me, seeing I go childless.”

Meaning,—“Yes, I know that;—but what is the good of You to me, if I haven’t a child? I am a poor mortal: I don’t care about the Heavens or You; I want a child.”

Meaning this, at least, if the Latin and English Bibles are right in their translation—“I am thy great gain.” But the Greek Bible differs from them; and puts the promise in a much more tempting form to the modern English mind. It does not represent God as offering Himself; but something far better than Himself, actually exchangeable property! Wealth, according to Mr. John Stuart Mill. Here is indeed a prospect for Abram!—and something to refuse, worth thinking twice about. For the Septuagint reads, “Fear not, Abram. I am thy Protector, and thou shalt [145]have an exceeding great pay.” Practically, just as if, supposing Sir Stafford Northcote to represent the English nation of the glorious future, a Sermon of the Lord should come just now to him, saying, “Fear not, Sir Stafford, I am thy Devastation; and thou shalt have an exceeding great surplus.”

On which supposition, Abram’s answer is less rude, but more astonishing. “Oh God, what wilt thou give me? What good is money to me, who am childless?”

Again, as if Sir Stafford Northcote should answer, in the name of the British people, saying, “Lord God, what wilt thou give me? What is the good to me of a surplus? What can I make of surplus? It is children that I want, not surplus!”

A truly notable parliamentary utterance on the Budget, if it might be! Not for a little while yet, thinks Sir Stafford; perhaps, think wiser and more sorrowful people than he, not until England has had to stone, according to the law of Deuteronomy xxi. 18, some of the children she has got: or at least to grapeshot them. I couldn’t get anything like comfortable rooms in the Pea Hen at St. Alban’s, the day before yesterday, because the Pea Hen was cherishing, for chickens under her wings, ever so many officers of the Royal Artillery; and some beautiful sixteen-pounders,—exquisite fulfilments of all that science could devise, in those machines; which were unlimbered in the market-place, on their way to Sheffield—where I [146]am going myself, as it happens. I wonder much, in the name of my mistress, whose finger is certainly in this pie, what business we have there, (both of us,) the black machines, and I. As Atropos would have it, too, I had only been making out, with good Mr. Douglas’s help, in Woolwich Repository on Wednesday last, a German Pea Hen’s inscription on a sixteen-pounder of the fourteenth century:—

Verse 5th. “And he brought him forth abroad, and said, Tell now the stars, if thou be able to number them. So shall thy seed be.”

Of course you would have answered God instantly, and told Him the exact number of the stars, and all their magnitudes. Simple Abram, conceiving that, even if he did count all he could see, there might yet be a few more out of sight, does not try.

Verse 6th. “And he believed in the Lord, and He counted it to him for righteousness.”

That, on the whole, is the primary verse of the entire Bible. If that is true, the rest is worth whatever Heaven is worth; if that is untrue, the rest is worth nothing. You had better, therefore, if you can, learn it also in Greek and Latin.

“Καὶ ἐπίστευσεν Ἀβραμ τῷ Θεῷ, καὶ ἐλογίσθη αὐτῷ εἰς δικαιοσύνην. [147]

“Credidit Abram Deo, et reputatum est illo in justitiam.”

If, then, that text be true, it will follow that you also, if you would have righteousness counted to you, must believe God. And you can’t believe Him if He never says anything to you. Whereupon it will be desirable again to consider if He ever has said anything to you; and if not, why not.

After this verse, I don’t understand much of the chapter myself—but I never expect to understand everything in the Bible, or even more than a little; and will make what I can of it.

Verses 7th, 8th. “And He said, I the Lord brought thee, to give thee this land, to inherit it.

“But he said, Lord, whereby shall I know that I shall inherit it?”

Now, I don’t see how he could know it better than by being told so; nor how he knew it any better, after seeing a lamp moving between half-carcases. But we will at least learn, as well as we can, what happened; and think it over.

The star-lesson was of course given in the night; and, in the morning, Abram slays the five creatures, and watches their bodies all day.

‘Such an absurd thing to do—to cut rams and cows in two, to please God!’

Indeed it seems so; yet perhaps is better than cutting men in two to please ourselves; and we spend [148]thirty millions a year in preparations for doing that. How many more swiftly divided carcases of horses and men, think you, my Christian friends, have the fowls fed on, not driven away,—finding them already carved for their feast, or blown into small and convenient morsels, by the military gentlemen of Europe, in sacrifice to—their own epaulettes, (poor gilded and eyeless idols!) during the past seventy and six years of this one out of the forty centuries since Abram?

“The birds divided he not.” A turtle dove, or in Greek ‘cooing dove;’ and a pigeon, or in Greek ‘dark dove;’ or black dove, such as came to Dodona;—these were not to be cut through breast and backbone! Why? Why, indeed, any of this butchery and wringing of necks? Not wholly, perhaps, for Abram’s amusement, or God’s; like our coursing and pigeon-shooting;—but then, all the more earnestly one asks, why?

The Episcopal commentary tells you, (usefully this time) that the beasts were divided, because among all nations it was then the most solemn attestation of covenant to pass between halves of beasts. But the birds?

We are not sure, by the way, how far the cleaving might reach, without absolute division. Read Leviticus i., 15 to 17, and v., 6 to 10. ‘You have nothing to do with those matters,’ you think? I don’t say you have; but in my schools you must know your Bible, and the meaning of it, or want of meaning, at [149]least a little more definitely than you do now, before I let you throw the book away for ever. So have patience with it a little while; for indeed until you know something of this Bible, I can’t go on to teach you any Koran, much less any Dante or Shakspeare. Have patience, therefore,—and you will need, probably, more than you think; for I am sadly afraid that you don’t at present know so much as the difference between a burnt-offering and a sin-offering; nor between a sin-offering and a trespass-offering,—do you? (Lev. v. 15); so how can you possibly know anything about Abram’s doves, or afterwards about Ion’s,—not to speak of the Madonna’s? The whole story of the Ionic migration, and the carving of those Ionic capitals, which our architects don’t know how to draw to this day, is complicated with the tradition of the saving of Ion’s life by his recognition of a very small ‘trespass’—a servant’s momentary ‘blasphemy.’ Hearing it, he poured the wine he was about to drink out upon the ground. A dove, flying down from the temple cornice, dipped her beak in it, and died, for the wine had been poisoned by—his mother. But the meaning of all that myth is involved in this earlier and wilder mystery of the Mount of the Amorite.

On the slope of it, down to the vale of Eshcol, sat Abram, as the sun ripened its grapes through the glowing day; the shadows lengthening at last under the crags of Machpelah;—the golden light warm on Ephron’s field, [150]still Ephron’s, wild with wood. “And as the sun went down, an horror of great darkness fell upon Abram.”

Indigestion, most likely, thinks modern philosophy. Accelerated cerebration, with automatic conservation of psychic force, lucidly suggests Dr. Carpenter. Derangement of the sensori-motor processes, having certain relations of nextness, and behaviour uniformly depending on that nextness, condescendingly explains Professor Clifford.

Well, my scientific friends, if ever God does you the grace to give you experience of the sensations, either of horror, or darkness, even to the extent your books and you inflict them on my own tired soul, you will come out on the other side of that shadow with newer views on many subjects than have occurred yet to you,—novelty-hunters though you be.

“Behold, thy seed shall be strangers, in a land not theirs.” Again, the importunate question returns, ‘When was this written?’ But the really practical value of the passage for ourselves, is the definite statement, alike by the Greeks and Hebrews, of dream, as one of the states in which knowledge of the future may be distinctly given. The truth of this statement we must again determine for ourselves. Our dreams are partly in our power, by management of daily thought and food; partly, involuntary and accidental—very apt to run in contrary lines from those naturally to be expected of them; and [151]partly, (at least, so say all the Hebrew prophets, and all great Greek, Latin, and English thinkers,) prophetic. Whether what Moses, Homer, David, Daniel, the Evangelists and St. Paul, Dante, Chaucer, Shakspeare, and Bacon, think on this matter, or what the last-whelped little curly-tailed puppy of the Newington University thinks, is most likely to be true—judge as you will.

“In the fourth generation they shall come hither again, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.”

What was the iniquity of the Amorites, think you, and what kind of people were they? Anything like ourselves? or wide-mouthed and goggle-eyed,—terrifically stalking above the vineyard stakes of Eshcol? If like us, in any wise, is it possible that we also may be committing iniquity, capable of less and more fulness, through such a space as four hundred years? Questions worth pausing at; and we will at least try to be a little clear-headed as to Amorite personality.

We habitually speak of the Holy Land as the Land of ‘Canaan.’ The ‘promised’ land was indeed that of Canaan, with others. But Israel never got it. They got only the Mount of the Amorites; for the promise was only to be perfected on condition of their perfect obedience. Therefore, I asked you to learn Genesis x. 15, and Genesis x. 16, separately. For all the Canaanites were left, to prove Israel, (Judges iii. 3,) and a good many of the Amorites and Jebusites too, (Judges iii. 5–7,) but in the main Israel subdued the last two races, and held the [152]hill country from Lebanon to Hebron, and the capital, Jerusalem, for their own. And if instead of ‘Amorites,’ you will read generally ‘Highlanders,’ (which the word means,) and think of them, for a beginning of notion, simply as Campbells and Macgregors of the East, getting themselves into relations with the pious Israelites closely resembling those of the Highland race and mind of Scotland with its evangelical and economical Lowlanders, you will read these parts of your Bible in at least an incipiently intelligent manner. And above all, you will, or may, understand that the Amorites had a great deal of good in them: that they and the Jebusites were on the whole a generous and courteous people,—so that, when Abram dwells with the Amorite princes, Mamre and Eshcol, they are faithful allies to him; and when he buys his grave from Ephron the Hittite, and David the threshing floor from Araunah the Jebusite, both of the mountaineers behave just as the proudest and truest Highland chief would. ‘What is that between me and thee?’ “All these things did Araunah, as a King, give unto the King—and Araunah said unto the King, The Lord thy God accept thee.” Not our God, you see;—but giving sadly, as the Sidonian widow begging,—with claim of no part in Israel.

‘Mere oriental formulæ,’ says the Cockney modern expositor—‘offers made in fore-knowledge that they would not be accepted.’

No, curly-tailed bow-wow; it is only you and other [153]such automatic poodles who are ‘formulæ.’ Automatic, by the way, you are not; we all know how to wind you up to run with a whirr, like toy-mice.

Well, now read consecutively, but quietly, Numbers xiii. 22–29, xxi. 13–26, Deuteronomy iii. 8–13, and Joshua x. 6–14, and you will get a notion or two, which with those already obtained you may best arrange as follows.

Put the Philistines, and giants, or bulls, of Bashan, out of the way at present; they are merely elements of physical malignant force, sent against Samson, Saul, and David, as a half-human shape of lion or bear,—carrying off the ark of God in their mouths, and not knowing in the least what to do with it. You already know Tyre as the trading power, Ethiopia as the ignorant—Egypt as the wise—slave; then the Amorites, among the children of Ham, correspond to the great mountain and pastoral powers of the Shemites; and are far the noblest and purest of the race: abiding in their own fastnesses, desiring no conquest, but as Sihon, admitting no invader;—holding their crags so that nothing can be taken out of the hand of the Amorite but with the sword and bow, (Gen. xlviii. 22;) yet living chiefly by pasture and agriculture; worshipping, in their early dynasties, the one eternal God; and, in the person of their great high priest, Melchizedec, but a few years before this vision, blessing the father of the faithful, and feeding him with the everlasting sacraments of earth,—bread and wine,—in [154]the level valley of the Kings, under Salem, the city of peace.

Truly, ‘the iniquity of the Amorites was not yet full.’

I have given you enough to think of, for this time; but you can’t work it out rightly without a clearly intelligible map of Palestine, and raised models of the districts of Hebron and Jerusalem, which I will provide as soon as possible, according to St. George’s notions of what such things should be, for the Sheffield museum: to the end that at least, in that district of the Yorkshire Amorites, singularly like the Holy Land in its level summits and cleft defiles, it may be understood what England also had once to bring forth of blessing in her own vales of peace; and how her gathering iniquity may bring upon her,—(and at this instant, as I write, early on Good Friday, the malignant hail of spring time, slaying blossom and leaf, smites rattling on the ground that should be soft with flowers,) such day of ruin as the great hail darkened in the going down to Beth-horon, and the sun, that had bronzed their corn and flushed their grape, prolonged on Ajalon, implacable.

“And it came to pass, when the sun went down, and it was dark, behold, a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp which passed between those pieces.”

What a lovely vision, half of it, at any rate, to the eye of modern progress! Foretelling, doubtless, smoking furnaces, and general civilization, in this Amorite land of barbarous vines and fig-trees! Yes—my progressive [155]friends. That was precisely what the vision did foretell,—in the first half of it; and not very many summer mornings afterwards, Abram going out for his walk in the dew round his farm,1 saw its fulfilment in quite literal terms, on the horizon. (Gen. xix. 28.) The smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace. But what do you make of the other part of the night-vision? Striking of oil? and sale of numerous patent lamps? But Abram never did strike any oil—except olive, which could only be had on the usual terms of laborious beating and grinding, and in moderate quantities. What do you make of the second half of the vision?

Only a minute part of its infinite prophecy was fulfilled in those flames of the Paradise of Lot. For the two fires were the sign of the presence of the Person who accepted the covenant, in passing between the pieces of the victim. And they shone, therefore, for the signature of His Name; that name which we [156]pray may be hallowed; and for what that name entirely means;—‘the Lord, merciful and gracious,—and that will by no means clear the guilty.’

For as on the one side He is like a refiner’s fire, so that none may abide the day of His coming,—so on the other He is the Light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world. And all the pain of grief and punishment, temporal or eternal, following on the broken covenant; and all the sweet guidance of the lamp to the feet and the light to the path, granted to those who keep it, are meant by the passing of the darkened and undarkened flames.

Finish now the learning this whole chapter accurately, and when you come to the eighteenth verse, note how much larger the promised land was, than we usually imagine it; and what different manner of possession the Israelites got of its borders, by the waters of Babylon, and rivers of Egypt, (compare Jeremiah xxxix. 9, with xliii. 6 and 7) than they might have had, if they had pleased.

And now, when you have got well into your heads that the Holy Land is, broadly, the mountain or highland of the Amorites, (compare Deut. i. 7, 20, 44, Numbers xiii. 29,) look to the verse which you have probably quoted often, “Behold upon the mountains the feet of Him that bringeth good tidings,”—without ever asking what mountains, or what tidings. The mountains are these Amorite crags, and the tidings are of the last destruction of the Hamite power, in the other three great brethren, [157]Cush, Mizraim, and Phut. Read your Nahum through slowly; and learn the eighth and ninth verses of the third chapter, to be always remembered as the completion of the fifteenth, which you know the first half of so well already—though I suppose you rarely go on to its practical close, “Oh Judah, keep thy solemn feasts, perform thy vows; for the wicked shall no more pass through thee”—this ‘passing,’ observe, being the ruinous war of the bitter and hasty nation, (compare Habakkuk i. 6–8, with the last verse of Nahum,) which spiritually is the type of all ruinous and violent passion, such as now passes continually to and fro in this English land of ours.

I am not much in a humour to examine further to-day the passing of its slower molluscous Assyrians; but may at least affirm what I believe at last to be the sure conclusion of my young hunter of Arundel; that the spiral of the shell uniformly increases its coil, from birth to maturity. Here are examples of the minute species, sent me by Mr. Sillar, in three stages of growth; the little black spots giving them in their natural size (with much economic skill of Mr. Burgess’ touch). The [158]three magnified spirals you may as well copy, and find out how many these little creatures may have. I had taken them for the young of the common snail when I wrote last; but we will have all our facts clear some day, both concerning bees, and slugs, and the larger creatures, industrious or lazy, whom they are meant to teach.

But I want to finish my letter for this time with a word or two more of my Scottish Amorite aunt, after she was brought down into Lowland life by her practical tanner. She, a pure dark-eyed dove-priestess, if ever there was one, of Highland Dodona.2 Strangely, the kitchen servant-of-all-work in the house at Rose Terrace was a very old “Mause” who might well have been the prototype of the Mause of ‘Old Mortality,’3 but had even [159]a more solemn, fearless, and patient faith, fastened in her by extreme suffering; for she had been nearly starved to death when she was a girl, and had literally picked the bones out of cast-out dust-heaps to gnaw; and ever afterwards, to see the waste of an atom of food was as shocking to her as blasphemy. “Oh, Miss Margaret!” she said once to my mother, who had shaken some crumbs off a dirty plate out of the window, “I had rather you had knocked me down.” She would make her dinner upon anything in the house that the other servants wouldn’t eat;—often upon potato skins, giving her own dinner away to any poor person she saw; and would always stand during the whole church service, (though at least seventy years old when I knew her, and very feeble,) if she could persuade any wild Amorite out of the streets to take her seat. Her wrinkled and worn face, moveless in resolution, and patience; incapable of smile, and knit sometimes perhaps too severely against Jessie and me, if we wanted more creamy milk to our porridge, or jumped off our favourite box on Sunday,—(‘Never mind, John,’ said Jessie to me, once, seeing me in an unchristian state of provocation on this subject, ‘when we’re married, we’ll jump off boxes all day long, if we like!’) may have been partly instrumental in giving me that slight bias against the Evangelical religion which I confess to be sometimes traceable in my later works: but I never can be thankful enough for having seen, in her, the Scottish Puritan spirit in its perfect faith and force; and been enabled therefore [160]afterwards to trace its agency in the reforming policy of Scotland with the reverence and honour it deserves.

My aunt was of a far gentler temper, but still, to me, remained at a wistful distance. She had been much saddened by the loss of three of her children, before her husband’s death. Little Peter, especially, had been the corner-stone of her love’s building; and it was thrown down swiftly:—white-swelling came in the knee; he suffered much; and grew weaker gradually, dutiful always, and loving, and wholly patient. She wanted him one day to take half a glass of port wine,—and took him on her knee, and put it to his lips. ‘Not now, mamma;—in a minute,’ said he; and put his head on her shoulder, and gave one long, low sigh, and died. Then there was Catherine; and—I forget the other little daughter’s name. I did not see them; my mother told me of them;—eagerly always about Catherine, who had been her own favourite. My aunt had been talking earnestly one day with her husband about these two children; planning this and that for their schooling and what not: at night, for a little while she could not sleep; and as she lay thinking, she saw the door of the room open; and two spades come into it, and stand at the foot of her bed. Both the children were dead within brief time afterwards. I was about to write ‘within a fortnight’—but I cannot be sure of remembering my mother’s words accurately.

But when I was in Perth, there were still—Mary, her eldest daughter, who looked after us children when Mause [161]was too busy,—James and John, William and Andrew; (I can’t think whom the unapostolic William was named after; he became afterwards a good physician in London, and Tunbridge Wells; his death, last year, is counted among the others that I have spoken of as recently leaving me very lonely). But the boys were then all at school or college,—the scholars, William and Andrew, only came home to tease Jessie and me, and eat the biggest jargonel pears; the collegians were wholly abstract; and the two girls and I played in our quiet ways on the North-inch, and by the ‘Lead,’ a stream, ‘led’ from the Tay past Rose Terrace, into the town for molinary purposes; and long ago, I suppose, bricked over, or choked with rubbish; but then lovely, and a perpetual treasure of flowing diamond to us children. Mary, by the way, was nearly fourteen—fair, blue-eyed, and moderately pretty; and as pious as Jessie, without being quite so zealous. And I scarcely know if those far years of summer sunshine were dreams, or if this horror of darkness is one, to-day, at St. Albans, where, driven out of the abbey, unable to bear the sight of its restorations, and out of the churchyard, where I would fain have stayed to draw, by the black plague-wind, I take refuge from all in an old apple-woman’s shop, because she reminds me of my Croydon Amorite aunt,—and her little window of the one in the parlour beside the shop in Market Street. She sells comic songs as well as apples. I invest a penny in ‘The Union Jack,’ and find, in the course [162]of conversation, that the result of our unlimited national prosperity upon her, is, that where she used to take twopence from one customer, she now takes five farthings from five,—that her rates are twelve shillings instead of six,—that she is very tired of it all, and hopes God will soon take her to heaven.

I have been a little obscure in direction about the Egyptian asterisk in last Fors. The circle in the middle is to be left solid; the rays round are to be cut quite shallow; not in deep furrows, as in wood, but like rising, sharp, cliff-edged harbours with flat bottoms of sand; as little of the hard rock being cut away as may be.

The Etrurian Leucothea has come at last; but please let my readers observe that my signature to it means only that it will answer our purpose, not that it is a good print, for Mr. Parker’s agent is a ‘Grober Baur,’ and will keep neither time nor troth in impressions. Farther, I have now put into Mr. Ward’s hands a photograph from a practice-sketch of my own at Oxford, in pure lead pencil, on grey paper secured with ink on the outlines, and touched with white on the lights. It is of a stuffed Kingfisher,—(one can’t see a live one in England nowadays,) and done at full speed of hand; aid it is to be copied for a balance practice to the slow spiral lines. [163]

NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.

I. Affairs of the Company.

I have given leave to two of our Companions to begin work on the twenty acres of ground in Worcestershire, given us by Mr. George Baker, our second donor of land; (it was all my fault that he wasn’t the first). The ground is in copsewood; but good for fruit trees; and shall be cleared and brought into bearing as soon as the two Companions can manage it. We shall now see what we are good for, working as backwoods-men, but in our own England.

I am in treaty for more land round our Sheffield museum; and have sent down to it, for a beginning of the mineralogical collection, the agates on which I lectured in February at the London Institution. This lecture I am printing, as fast as I can, for the third number of ‘Deucalion;’ but I find no scientific persons who care to answer me any single question I ask them about agates; and I have to work all out myself; and little hitches and twitches come, in what one wants to say in print. And the days go.

Subscriptions since March 14th to April 16th. I must give names, now; having finally resolved to have no secrets in our Company,—except those which must be eternally secret to certain kinds of persons, who can’t understand either our thoughts or ways:— [164]

		£	s.	d.
March.	F. D. Drewitt (tithe of a first earning)	1	4	1
	Miss M. Guest	2	2	0
April.	James Burdon (tithe of wages)	2	10	0
	Wm. B. Graham (gift)	1	0	0
	Anonymous (post stamp, Birkenhead)	1	10	0
		£8	6	1

II. Affairs of the Master.

					£	s.	d.
March 16.	Balance				1471	8	11
21.	Miss O. Hill, 1½ year’s rent on Marylebone Freehold				90	5	0
28.	R. Forsyth (tea-shop)				54	0	0
April 7.	Dividend on £7000 Bank Stock				315	0	0
8.	Petty cash (Dividends on small shares in Building Societies and the like)				25	3	3
					1956	6	4
March 21.	Jackson	£50	0	0
22.	Self4	100	0	0
23.	Warren and Jones	56	16	3
25,	and April 7. Crawley	40	0	0
April 1.	Secretary	25	0	0
1.	Downs	25	0	0
2.	Kate, (and 11th April)	45	0	0
6.	Burgess	50	0	0
6.	David	53	0	0
					444	16	3
	Balance, April 16.				£1511	10	1

III. I have promised an answer this month to the following pretty little letter; and will try to answer fully, though I must go over ground crossed often enough before. But it is often well to repeat things in other times and words:— [165]

“16th March, 1876.

“Sir,—Being very much interested in the St. George’s Society, we venture to write and ask you if you will be so kind as to send us the rules, as, even if we could not join it, we should so like to try and keep them. We hope you will excuse our troubling you, but we do not know how else to obtain the rules.

We remain, yours truly.”

My dear children, the rules of St. George’s Company are none other than those which at your baptism your godfather and godmother promised to see that you should obey—namely, the rules of conduct given to all His disciples by Christ, so far as, according to your ages, you can understand or practise them. But the Christian religion being now mostly obsolete, (and worse, falsely professed) throughout Europe, your godfather, and godmother, too probably, had no very clear notion of the Devil or his works, when they promised you should renounce them; and St. George hereby sends you a splinter of his lance, in token that you will find extreme difficulty in putting any of Christ’s wishes into practice, under the present basilisk power of society.

Nevertheless, St. George’s first order to you, supposing you were put under his charge, would be that you should always, in whatever you do, endeavour to please Christ; (and He is quite easily pleased if you try;) but in attempting this, you will instantly find yourself likely to displease many of your friends or relations; and St. George’s second order to you is that in whatever you do, you consider what is kind and dutiful to them also, and that you hold it for a sure rule that no manner of disobedience to your parents, or of disrespect and presumption towards your friends, can be pleasing to God. You must therefore be doubly submissive; first in your own will and purpose to the law of Christ; then in the carrying [166]out of your purpose, to the pleasure and orders of the persons whom He has given you for superiors. And you are not to submit to them sullenly, but joyfully and heartily, keeping nevertheless your own purpose clear, so soon as it becomes proper for you to carry it out.

Under these conditions, here are a few of St. George’s orders for you to begin with:—

1st. Keep absolute calm of temper, under all chances; receiving everything that is provoking and disagreeable to you as coming directly from Christ’s hand: and the more it is like to provoke you, thank Him for it the more; as a young soldier would his general for trusting him with a hard place to hold on the rampart. And remember, it does not in the least matter what happens to you,—whether a clumsy schoolfellow tears your dress, or a shrewd one laughs at you, or the governess doesn’t understand you. The one thing needful is that none of these things should vex you. For your mind is at this time of your youth crystallizing like sugar-candy; and the least jar to it flaws the crystal, and that permanently.

2nd. Say to yourselves every morning, just after your prayers: “Whoso forsaketh not all that he hath, cannot be my disciple.” That is exactly and completely true: meaning that you are to give all you have to Christ to take care of for you. Then if He doesn’t take care of it, of course you know it wasn’t worth anything. And if He takes anything from you, you know you are better without it. You will not indeed, at your age, have to give up houses, or lands, or boats, or nets; but you may perhaps break your favourite teacup, or lose your favourite thimble, and might be vexed about it, but for this second St. George’s precept.

3rd. What, after this surrender, you find entrusted to you, take extreme care of, and make as useful as possible. The greater part of all they have is usually given to grown-up people [167]by Christ, merely that they may give it away again: but schoolgirls, for the most part, are likely to have little more than what is needed for themselves: of which, whether books, dresses, or pretty room furniture, you are to take extreme care, looking on yourself, indeed, practically, as a little housemaid set to keep Christ’s books and room in order, and not as yourself the mistress of anything.

4th. Dress as plainly as your parents will allow you: but in bright colours, (if they become you,) and in the best materials,—that is to say, in those which will wear longest. When you are really in want of a new dress, buy it, (or make it) in the fashion: but never quit an old one merely because it has become unfashionable. And if the fashion be costly, you must not follow it. You may wear broad stripes or narrow, bright colours or dark, short petticoats or long, (in moderation,) as the public wish you; but you must not buy yards of useless stuff to make a knot or a flounce of, nor drag them behind you over the ground. And your walking dress must never touch the ground at all. I have lost much of the faith I once had in the common sense and even in the personal delicacy of the present race of average English women, by seeing how they will allow their dresses to sweep the streets, if it is the fashion to be scavengers.

5th. If you can afford it, get your dresses made by a good dressmaker, with utmost attainable precision and perfection: but let this good dressmaker be a poor person, living in the country; not a rich person living in a large house in London. ‘There are no good dressmakers in the country.’ No: but there soon will be if you obey St. George’s orders, which are very strict indeed, about never buying dresses in London. ‘You bought one there, the other day, for your own pet!’ Yes; but that was because she was a wild Amorite, who had wild Amorites to please; not a Companion of St. George.

6th. Learn dressmaking yourself, with pains and time; and [168]use a part of every day in needlework, making as pretty dresses as you can for poor people who have not time nor taste to make them nicely for themselves. You are to show them in your own wearing what is most right, and graceful; and to help them to choose what will be prettiest and most becoming in their own station. If they see that you never try to dress above your’s, they will not try to dress above their’s. Read the little scene between Miss Somers and Simple Susan, in the draper’s shop, in Miss Edgeworth’s Parent’s Assistant; and by the way, if you have not that book, let it be the next birthday present you ask papa or uncle for.

7th. Never seek for amusement, but be always ready to be amused. The least thing has play in it—the slightest word, wit, when your hands are busy and your heart is free. But if you make the aim of your life amusement, the day will come when all the agonies of a pantomime will not bring you an honest laugh. Play actively and gaily; and cherish, without straining, the natural powers of jest in others and yourselves;—remembering all the while that your hand is every instant on the helm of the ship of your life, and that the Master, on the far shore of Araby the blest, looks for its sail on the horizon,—to its hour.

I can’t tell you more till next letter.

IV. Extract from a letter of one of my own girl-pupils and charges:—

“What is to be done with town children? Do you remember going with me to see Mrs. G——, our old servant? She has died since, and left two children for us to love and care for, for her. The elder, Louie, is thirteen; unusually intelligent and refined; I was helping her last night in her work for an examination. She had Tennyson’s ‘Dora’ to learn by heart, and said it beautifully, with so much spirit,—and then, [169]asked me what the harvest was. She said she had such a vague idea about it, she shouldn’t know how to explain it, if the Inspector asked her.

“I am just going to take her down to the picture gallery, to give her a geography lesson on moors and lakes, etc., which is the best I can do for her here; but isn’t that dreadful?

“Much love, dear Godfather,
“Ever your loving Godchild.”

V. I accept the offer of subjoined letter thankfully. Our Companion, Mr. Rydings, is henceforward to be answerable for our arithmetic; and all sums below fifty pounds are to be sent to him, not to me.

“Laxey, April 14, 1876.

“My dear Master,—At page 129, April ‘Fors’ Subscription List, bottom of page 129, balance in hand £106 16s. 5d., should be £107 16s. 5d.

“Yours, ever truly,
“Egbert Rydings.

“P.S.—Would it be possible to have these items checked before being printed? I should feel it a pleasure if I could be of use.”

[170]

[171]

[All Signed Petitions against Rydal Railway to be sent immediately to me at Brantwood, Coniston, Lancashire.]

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;”1 and 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.

‘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 of it when 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 says He will 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,3 not 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 I don’t like 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 holds me in the hollow of its hand!” Well, I hope I am handsomer 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 have you to 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 carelessness am wiser than you, because I do know 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 of her time is thus proved to be precisely the wild rose of my time, 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, there is an 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, which had been 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.’

With this picture, will you compare that so opportunely furnished me by the author of the ‘Angel in the House,’5 of 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. Your Humanity 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, who have thought 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.

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 century B.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]

As I am now often asked, in private letters, the constitution of St. George’s Company, and cannot, hitherto, refer, in answer, to any clear summary of it, I will try to write such a summary in this number of Fors; that it may henceforward be sent to inquirers as alone sufficiently explanatory.

The St. George’s Company is a society established to carry out certain charitable objects, towards which it invites, and thankfully will receive, help from any persons caring to give it, either in money, labour, or any kind of gift. But the Company itself consists of persons who agree in certain general principles of action, and objects of pursuit, and who can, therefore, act together in effective and constant unison.

These objects of pursuit are, in brief terms, the health, wealth, and long life of the British nation: the Company having thus devoted itself, in the conviction that the British nation is at present unhealthy, poor, and likely to perish, as a power, from the face of the [204]earth. They accordingly propose to themselves the general medicining, enriching, and preserving in political strength, of the population of these islands; they themselves numbering at present, in their ranks, about thirty persons,—none of them rich, several of them sick, and the leader of them, at all events, not likely to live long.

Whether the nation be healthy, or in unwholesome degradation of body and mind; wealthy, or in continual and shameful distress; strong, or in rapid decline of political power and authority,—the reader will find debated throughout the various contents of the preceding five volumes of Fors. But there is one public fact, which cannot be debated—that the nation is in debt. And the St. George’s Company do practically make it their first, though not their principal, object, to bring that state of things to an end; and to establish, instead of a National Debt, a National Store. (See the last line of the fifth page of the first letter of the series, published 1st January, 1871, and the eleventh, and twenty-seventh, letters, throughout.)

That very few readers of this page have any notion, at this moment, what a National Debt is, or can conceive what a National Store should be, is one of many evil consequences of the lies which, under the title of “Political Economy,” have been taught by the ill-educated, and mostly dishonest, commercial men who at present govern the press of the country. [205]

I have again and again stated the truth in both these matters, but must try once more to do it, emphatically, and intelligibly.

A ‘civilized nation’ in modern Europe consists, in broad terms, of (A) a mass of half-taught, discontented, and mostly penniless populace, calling itself the people; of (B) a thing which it calls a government—meaning an apparatus for collecting and spending money; and (C) a small number of capitalists, many of them rogues, and most of them stupid persons, who have no idea of any object of human existence other than money-making, gambling, or champagne-bibbing. A certain quantity of literary men, saying anything they can get paid to say,—of clergymen, saying anything they have been taught to say,—of natural philosophers, saying anything that comes into their heads,—and of nobility, saying nothing at all, combine in disguising the action, and perfecting the disorganization, of the mass; but with respect to practical business, the civilized nation consists broadly of mob, money-collecting machine, and capitalist.

Now when the civilized mob wants to spend money for any profitless or mischievous purposes,—fireworks, illuminations, battles, driving about from place to place, or what not,—being itself penniless, it sets its money-collecting machine to borrow the sum needful for these amusements from the civilized capitalist.

The civilized capitalist lends the money, on condition [206]that, through the money-collecting machine, he may tax the civilized mob thenceforward for ever. The civilized mob spends the money forthwith, in gunpowder, infernal machines, masquerade dresses, new boulevards, or anything else it has set its idiotic mind on for the moment; and appoints its money-collecting machine to collect a daily tax from its children, and children’s children, to be paid to the capitalists from whom it had received the accommodation, thenceforward for ever.

That is the nature of a National Debt.

In order to understand that of a National Store, my readers must first consider what any store whatever, serviceable to human beings, consists of. A store properly means a collection of useful things. Literally, it signifies only a quantity,—or much of anything. But the heap of broken bottles which, I hear, is accumulating under the principal cliff of Snowdon, through the contributions of tourists from the summit, is not properly to be called a store; though a binful of old wine is. Neither is a heap of cannon-balls a store;1 though a heap of potatoes is. Neither is a cellar full of gunpowder a store; though a cellar full of coals is. A store is, for squirrels, of nuts; for bees, of honey; for men, of food, clothes, fuel, or pretty things, such as toys or jewels,—and, for educated persons, of books and pictures. [207]

And the possession of such a store by the nation would signify, that there were no taxes to pay; that everybody had clothes enough, and some stuff laid by for next year; that everybody had food enough, and plenty of salted pork, pickled walnuts, potted shrimps, or other conserves, in the cupboard; that everybody had jewels enough, and some of the biggest laid by, in treasuries and museums; and, of persons caring for such things, that everybody had as many books and pictures as they could read or look at; with quantities of the highest quality besides, in easily accessible public libraries and galleries.

Now the wretches who have, at present, the teaching of the people in their hands, through the public press, tell them that it is not ‘practical’ to attempt to bring about this state of things;—and that their government, or money-collecting machine, must not buy wine, potatoes, jewels, or pictures for them; but must buy iron plates two feet thick, gunpowder, and red tape. And this popular instruction is given, you will find, in the end, by persons who know that they could not get a percentage themselves, (without the public’s coming to know it,) on buying potatoes or pictures; but can get it, and a large one, on manufacturing iron, on committing wholesale murder, or on tying up papers with red tape.

Now the St. George’s Company propose to themselves,—and, if the God they believe in, lives, will [208]assuredly succeed in their proposition,—to put an end to this rascally and inhuman state of things, and bring about an honest and human state of them, instead. And they have already actually begun the accumulation of a National Store of good and useful things; by the collection and administration of which, they are not themselves to derive any gain whatsoever, but the Nation only.

We are, therefore, at present, as I said at first, a company established for a charitable purpose; the object of charity being the entire body of the British nation, now paying taxes to cheating capitalists. But we hope to include, finally, in our ranks a large number of the people themselves, and to make quite a different sort of people of them, carrying out our company’s laws, to the abolition of many existing interests, and in abrogation of many existing arrangements.

And the laws which we hope thus to see accepted are none of them new; but have been already recommended by all wise men, and practised by all truly prosperous states; nor is there anything whatever new in the modes of administration proposed;—and especially be it noted, there is nothing of the present leader’s fancies, in any part or character of the scheme—which is merely the application, to our nationally diseased thoughts and practices, of the direct precepts of the true sages of past time, who are every one of [209]them in harmony concerning all that is necessary for men to do, feel, and know.

And we hope to establish these laws, not by violence, but by obeying them ourselves, to the extent of which existing circumstances admit; and so gradually showing the advantage of them, and making them acceptable to others. Not that, for the enforcement of some of them, (the abolition of all manufactures that make the air unwholesome, for instance,) we shall hesitate to use the strong hand, when once our hands are strong. But we shall not begin by street riots to throw down our neighbour’s chimneys, or break his machinery;—though what we shall end in doing—God knows, not I,—but I have my own thoughts concerning it; not at present needing exposition.

The Companions, for the most part, will remain exactly in the condition of life they held before entering the Society; but they will direct all their powers, and some part of their revenues, in that condition, to the advance of its interests. We hold it shortsighted and ruinous policy to form separate institutions, or attempt the sudden establishment of new systems of labour. Every one of us must use the advantages he now possesses, whatever they may be, and contend with the difficulties arising out of his present position, gradually modifying it, as he can, into conformity with the laws which the Society desires may be ultimately observed by all its members. [210]

The first of our conditions of Companionship is Honesty. We are a company of honest persons, vowing to have no fellowship with dishonest ones. Persons who do not know the meaning of the word ‘Honesty,’ or who would in anywise, for selfish convenience, tolerate any manner of cheating or lying, either in others or themselves, we class indiscriminately with the self-conscious rogues, for whom we have more respect; and our separation from all such is to be quite manifest and unmistakable. We do not go into monasteries,—we seek no freedom of conscience in foreign lands,—we profess no severities of asceticism at home. We simply refuse to have any dealings with rogues, whether at home or abroad.

I repeat, for this must be strictly understood; we are a company of honest persons; and will add to ourselves none but persons of that quality. We, for our own part, entirely decline to live by passing bad half-crowns, by selling bad goods, or by lying as to their relative quality. And we hold only such communication with persons guilty of such practices, as we should with any other manner of thieves or liars.

It will follow that anything gravely said by a Companion of St. George may be, without investigation, believed; and anything sold by one, without scrutiny, bought for what it is said to be,—of which recovery of old principles of human speech and commerce, no words can set forth the infinitude of beneficial consequences, [211]when it is once brought about among a discernible and every day increasing body of persons.

The second condition of companionship is the resolution, so far as we have ability, to earn our own living with our own hands; and not to allow, much less compel, other people to work for us: this duty being of double force,—first, as necessary to our own health and honour; but much more, as striking home at the ghastly universal crime of modern society,—stealing the labourer’s bread from him, (making him work, that is to say, for our’s, as well as his own,) and then abusing and despising him for the degradation of character which his perpetual toil involves;2 deliberately, in many cases, refusing to encourage him in economy, that we may have him at our mercy to grind in the mill; always selling as much gin and beer to him as we can persuade him to swill, at the rate of twenty-pence for twopence’ worth, (see Letter XXVII.,) to fill our own pockets; and teaching him pious catechisms, that we may keep him our quiet slave.

We cannot, at present, all obey this great law concerning labour, however willing we may be; for we may not, in the condition of life in which we have been brought up, have been taught any manual labour by which we now could make a living. I myself, the present Master of the Society, cannot obey this, its second main law; but then I am only a makeshift Master, taking the place till [212]somebody more fit for it be found. Sir Walter Scott’s life, in the full strength of it at Ashestiel, and early at Abbotsford, with his literary work done by ten, or at latest twelve, in the morning; and the rest of the day spent in useful work with Tom Purdie in his woods, is a model of wise moral management of mind and body, for men of true literary power; but I had neither the country training of body, nor have the natural strength of brain, which can reach this ideal in anywise. Sir Walter wrote as a stream flows; but I do all my brain-work like a wrung sponge, and am tired out, and good for nothing, after it. Sir Walter was in the open air, farm-bred, and playing with lambs, while I was a poor little Cockney wretch, playing, in a dark London nursery, with a bunch of keys. I do the best I can, and know what ought to be; and that is all the Company really need of me. I would fain, at this moment, both for pleasure and duty’s sake, be cutting the dead stems out of my wood, or learning to build a dry stone wall under my good mason, Mr. Usher, than writing these institutes of St. George; but the institutes are needed, and must be written by me, since there is nobody else to write them.

Any one, therefore, may be a Companion of St. George who sincerely does what they can, to make themselves useful, and earn their daily bread by their own labour: and some forms of intellectual or artistic labour, inconsistent (as a musician’s) with other manual labour, [213]are accepted by the Society as useful; provided they be truly undertaken for the good and help of all; and that the intellectual labourer ask no more pay than any other workman. A scholar can generally live on less food than a ploughman, and there is no conceivable reason why he should have more.3 And if he be a false-hearted scholar, or a bad painter or fiddler, there is infinite reason why he should have less. My readers may have been surprised at the instant and eager assertion, as of a leading principle, in the first of these letters, (January ’71,) that people cannot live by art. But I spoke swiftly, because the attempt so to live is among the worst possible ways they can take of injurious begging. There are a few, a very few persons born in each generation, whose words are worth hearing; whose art is worth seeing. These born few will preach, or sing, or paint, in spite of you; they will starve like grasshoppers, rather than stop singing; and even if you don’t choose to listen, it is charitable to throw them some crumbs to keep them alive. But the people who take to writing or painting as a means of livelihood, because they think it genteel, are just by so much more contemptible than common beggars, in that they are noisy and offensive beggars. I am quite willing to pay [214]for keeping our poor vagabonds in the workhouse; but not to pay them for grinding organs outside my door, defacing the streets with bills and caricatures, tempting young girls to read rubbishy novels, or deceiving the whole nation to its ruin, in a thousand leagues square of dirtily printed falsehood, every morning at breakfast. Whatever in literature, art, or religion, is done for money, is poisonous itself; and doubly deadly, in preventing the hearing or seeing of the noble literature and art which have been done for love and truth. If people cannot make their bread by honest labour, let them at least make no noise about the streets; but hold their tongues, and hold out their idle hands humbly; and they shall be fed kindly.

Then the third condition of Companionship is, that, after we have done as much manual work as will earn our food, we all of us discipline ourselves, our children, and any one else willing to be taught, in all the branches of honourable knowledge and graceful art attainable by us. Having honestly obtained our meat and drink, and having sufficiently eaten and drunken, we proceed, during the rest of the day, to seek after things better than meat and drink; and to provide for the nobler necessities of what, in ancient days, Englishmen used to call their souls.

To this end, we shall, as we increase in numbers, establish such churches and schools as may best guide religious feeling, and diffuse the love of sound learning [215]and prudent art. And when I set myself first to the work of forming the Society, I was induced to do so chiefly by the consciousness that the balanced unison of artistic sensibility with scientific faculty, which enabled me at once to love Giotto, and learn from Galileo, gave me singular advantages for a work of this kind. More particularly, the course of study through which, after being trained in the severest schools of Protestant divinity, I became acquainted with the mythology of Greece, and legends of Rome, in their most vivid power over the believing minds of both nations, permits me now to accept with freedom and respect the concurrence of a wider range of persons holding different views on religious subjects, than any other scholar I know, at the present day, in England, would feel himself secure in the hope of reconciling to a common duty, and in uncontested elements of faith.

The scheme, and elementary means, of this common education, I am now occupied in arranging and choosing as I best may.4 In especial, I have set myself to write three grammars—of geology, botany, and zoology, which will contain nothing but indisputable facts in those three branches of proper human learning; and which, if I live a little longer, will embrace as many facts as any ordinary schoolboy or schoolgirl need be taught. In these three grammars, (‘Deucalion,’ ‘Proserpina,’ and ‘Love’s [216]Meinie,’5) I shall accept every aid that sensible and earnest men of science can spare me, towards the task of popular education: and I hope to keep thankful records of the names of the persons who are making true discoveries in any of these sciences, and of the dates of such discovery, which shall be unassailably trustworthy as far as they extend. I hope also to be able to choose, and in some degree provide, a body of popular literature of entirely serviceable quality. Of some of the most precious books needed, I am preparing, with the help of my friends, new editions, for a common possession in all our school libraries.

If I have powers fitted for this task, (and I should not have attempted it but in conviction that I have,) they are owing mainly to this one condition of my life, that, from my youth up, I have been seeking the fame, and honouring the work, of others;—never my own. I first was driven into literature that I might defend the fame of Turner; since that day I have been explaining the power, or proclaiming the praise, of Tintoret,—of Luini,—of Carpaccio,—of Botticelli,—of Carlyle;—never thinking for an instant of myself: and sacrificing what little faculty, and large pleasure, I had in painting, either from nature or noble art, that, if possible, I might bring others to see what I rejoiced in, and understand what I had deciphered. There has been [217]no heroism in this, nor virtue;—but only, as far as I am myself concerned, quaint ordering of Fate; but the result is, that I have at last obtained an instinct of impartial and reverent judgment, which sternly fits me for this final work, to which, if to anything, I was appointed.

And for the right doing of it, and for all future work of the same kind, requiring to be done for the Society by other persons, it is absolutely needful that the person charged with it should be implicitly trusted, and accurately obeyed by the Companions, in all matters necessary to the working of the Society. He cannot lose his time in contention or persuasion; he must act undisturbedly, or his mind will not suffice for its toil; and with concurrence of all the Society’s power, or half their power will be wasted, and the whole perverted, by hesitation and opposition. His authority over them must correspond precisely, in the war against the poverty and vice of the State, to that of a Roman Dictator, in his war against its external enemies.

Of a Roman ‘Dictator,’ I say, observe: not a Roman ‘Emperor.’ It is not the command of private will, but the dictation of necessary law, which the Society obeys:—only, the obedience must be absolute, and without question; faithful to the uttermost,—that is to say, trusting to the uttermost. The practice of faith and obedience to some of our fellow-creatures is the alphabet by which we learn the higher obedience to heaven; [218]and it is not only needful to the prosperity of all noble united action, but essential to the happiness of all noble living spirits.

I have not, in my past letters, much noticed this condition of the Society’s work; because its explanation will involve that of our religious creed to the full; and its enforcement must be in the very teeth of the mad-dog’s creed of modernism, “I will not be dictated to,” which contains the essence of all diabolical error. For, in sum, the moral scale is raised exactly according to the degree and motive of obedience. To be disobedient through temptation, is human sin; but to be disobedient for the sake of disobedience, fiendish sin. To be obedient for the sake of success in conduct, is human virtue; but to be obedient for the sake of obedience, angelic virtue.

The constitution of the Society is to be, therefore, that of an aristocracy electing an absolute chief, (as the Senate of Rome their Dictator, or the Senate of Venice their Doge,) who is to be entirely responsible for the conduct of the Society’s affairs; to appoint its principal officers, and to grant or refuse admission to candidates for Companionship. But he is liable to deposition at any moment, by a vote of the majority of the Companions; and is to have no control over the property of the Society, but through the Trustees in whom that property is vested.

And now, for farther explanation of the details of [219]our constitution and design, I must refer the reader to the Fors for March of this year; and, if he desires to pursue his inquiry, to the 8th, 9th, 11th, 17th, and 19th Letters of the previous series. These state clearly what we propose to do, and how: but, for defence of our principles, the entire series of Letters must be studied; and that with quiet attention, for not a word of them has been written but with purpose. Some parts of the plan are confessedly unexplained, and others obscurely hinted at; nor do I choose to say how much of this indistinctness has been intentional. But I am well assured that if any patient and candid person cares to understand the book, and master its contents, he may do so with less pains than would be required for the reading of any ordinary philosophical treatise on equally important subjects.

Only readers should be clearly aware of one peculiarity in the manner of my writing in Fors, which might otherwise much mislead them:—namely, that if they will enclose in brackets with their pen, passages of evident irony, all the rest of the book is written with absolute seriousness and literalness of meaning. The violence, or grotesque aspect, of a statement may seem as if I were mocking; but this comes mainly of my endeavour to bring the absolute truth out into pure crystalline structure, unmodified by disguise of custom, or obscurity of language; for the result of that process is continually to reduce the facts into a form so [220]contrary, if theoretical, to our ordinary impressions, and so contrary, if moral, to our ordinary practice, that the straightforward statement of them looks like a jest. But every such apparent jest will be found, if you think of it, a pure, very dreadful, and utterly imperious, veracity.

With this understanding, the following series of aphorisms contain the gist of the book, and may serve to facilitate the arrangement of its incidental matter.

1. Any form of government will work, provided the governors are real, and the people obey them; and none will work, if the governors are unreal, or the people disobedient. If you mean to have logs for kings, no quantity of liberty in choice of the wood will be of any profit to you:—nor will the wisest or best governor be able to serve you, if you mean to discuss his orders instead of obeying them. Read carefully on this matter Letter XIII., pp. 7 and 8.

2. The first duty of government is to see that the people have food, fuel, and clothes. The second, that they have means of moral and intellectual education.

3. Food, fuel, and clothes can only be got out of the ground, or sea, by muscular labour; and no man has any business to have any, unless he has done, if able, the muscular work necessary to produce his portion, or to render, (as the labour of a surgeon or physician renders,) equivalent benefit to life. It indeed saves both toil and time that one man should dig, another bake, [221]and another tan; but the digger, baker, and tanner are alike bound to do their equal day’s duty; and the business of the government is to see that they have done it, before it gives any one of them their dinner.

4. While the daily teaching of God’s truth, doing of His justice, and heroic bearing of His sword, are to be required of every human soul according to its ability, the mercenary professions of preaching, law-giving, and fighting must be entirely abolished.

5. Scholars, painters, and musicians, may be advisedly kept, on due pittance, to instruct or amuse the labourer after, or at, his work; provided the duty be severely restricted to those who have high special gifts of voice, touch, and imagination;6 and that the possessors of these melodious lips, light-fingered hands, and lively brains, do resolutely undergo the normal discipline necessary to ensure their skill; the people whom they are to please, understanding, always, that they cannot employ these tricksy artists without working double-tides themselves, to provide them with beef and ale.

6. The duty of the government, as regards the distribution of its work, is to attend first to the wants of the most necessitous; therefore, to take particular charge of the back streets of every town; leaving the fine ones, [222]more or less, according to their finery, to take care or themselves. And it is the duty of magistrates, and other persons in authority, but especially of all bishops, to know thoroughly the numbers, means of subsistence, and modes of life of the poorest persons in the community, and to be sure that they at least are virtuous and comfortable; for if poor persons be not virtuous, after all the wholesome discipline of poverty, what must be the state of the rich, under their perilous trials and temptations?7—but, on the other hand, if the poor are made comfortable and good, the rich have a fair chance of entering the kingdom of heaven also, if they choose to live honourably and decently.

7. Since all are to be made to labour for their living, and it is not possible to labour without materials and tools, these must be provided by the government, for all persons, in the necessary quantities. If bricks are to be made, clay and straw must be provided; if sheep are to be kept, grass; if coats are to be made, cloth; if [223]oakum to be picked, oakum. All these raw materials, with the tools for working them, must be provided by the government, at first, free of cost to the labourer, the value of them being returned to them as the first-fruits of his toil; and no pawnbrokers or usurers may be allowed to live by lending sea to fishermen, air to fowlers, land to farmers, crooks to shepherds, or bellows to smiths.

8. When the lands and seas belonging to any nation are all properly divided, cultivated, and fished, its population cannot be increased, except by importing food in exchange for useless articles,—that is to say, by living as the toy-manufacturers of some independent nation, which can both feed itself, and afford to buy toys besides. But no nation can long exist in this servile state. It must either emigrate, and form colonies to assist in cultivating the land which feeds it, or become entirely slavish and debased. The moment any nation begins to import food,8 its political power and moral worth are ended.

9. All the food, clothing, and fuel required by men, can be produced by the labour of their own arms on the earth and sea; all food is appointed to be so produced, and must be so produced, at their peril. If instead of taking the quantity of exercise made necessary [224]to their bodies by God, in the work appointed by God, they take it in hunting or shooting, they become ignorant, irreligious, and finally insane, and seek to live by fighting as well as by hunting; whence the type of Nimrod in the circle of the Hell-towers, which I desired you to study in Dante. If they do not take exercise at all, they become sensual, and insane in worse ways. And it is physically impossible that true religious knowledge, or pure morality, should exist among any classes of a nation who do not work with their hands for their bread. Read Letter XI. carefully.

10. The use of machinery9 in agriculture throws a certain number of persons out of wholesome employment, who must thenceforward either do nothing, or mischief. The use of machinery in art destroys the national intellect; and, finally, renders all luxury impossible. All machinery needful in ordinary life to supplement human or animal labour may be moved by wind or water: while steam, or any modes of heat-power, may only be employed justifiably under extreme or special conditions of need; as for speed on main lines of communication, and for raising water from great depths, or other such work beyond human strength. [225]

11. No true luxury, wealth, or religion is possible to dirty persons; nor is it decent or human to attempt to compass any temporal prosperity whatever by the sacrifice of cleanliness. The speedy abolition of all abolishable filth is the first process of education;10 the principles of which I state in the second group of aphorisms following.

12. All education must be moral first; intellectual secondarily. Intellectual, before—(much more without)—moral education, is, in completeness, impossible; and in incompleteness, a calamity.

13. Moral education begins in making the creature to be educated, clean, and obedient. This must be done thoroughly, and at any cost, and with any kind of compulsion rendered necessary by the nature of the animal, be it dog, child, or man.

14. Moral education consists next in making the creature practically serviceable to other creatures, according to the nature and extent of its own capacities; taking care that these be healthily developed in such service. It may be a question how long, and to what extent, boys and girls of fine race may be allowed to run in the paddock before they are broken; but assuredly the sooner they are put to such work as they are able [226]for, the better.11 Moral education is summed when the creature has been made to do its work with delight, and thoroughly; but this cannot be until some degree of intellectual education has been given also.

15. Intellectual education consists in giving the creature the faculties of admiration, hope, and love.

These are to be taught by the study of beautiful Nature; the sight and history of noble persons; and the setting forth of noble objects of action.

16. Since all noble persons hitherto existent in the world have trusted in the government of it by a supreme Spirit, and in that trust, or faith, have performed all their great actions, the history of these persons will finally mean the history of their faith; and the sum of intellectual education will be the separation of what is inhuman, in such faiths, and therefore perishing, from what is human, and, for human creatures, eternally true.

These sixteen aphorisms contain, as plainly as I can speak it, the substance of what I have hitherto taught, and am now purposed to enforce practice of, as far as I am able. It is no business of mine to think about possibilities;—any day, any moment, may raise up some one to take the carrying forward of the plan out of my hands, or to furnish me with larger means [227]of prosecuting it; meantime, neither hastening nor slackening, I shall go on doing what I can, with the people, few or many, who are ready to help me.

Such help, (to conclude with what simplest practical direction I can,) may be given me by any persons interested in my plans, mainly by sending me money; secondly, by acting out as much as they agree with of the directions for private life given in Fors; and thirdly, by promulgating and recommending such principles. If they wish to do more than this, and to become actual members of the Company, they must write to me, giving a short and clear account of their past lives, and present circumstances. I then examine them on such points as seem to me necessary; and if I accept them, I inscribe their names in the roll, at Corpus Christi College, with two of our masters for witnesses. This roll of the Company is written, hitherto, on the blank leaves of an eleventh-century MS. of the Gospels, always kept in my rooms; and would enable the Trustees, in case of my death, at once to consult the Companions respecting the disposition of the Society’s property. As to the legal tenure of that property, I have taken counsel with my lawyer-friends till I am tired; and, as will be seen by the statement in the first page of the Correspondence, I purpose henceforward to leave all such legal arrangements to the discretion of the Companions themselves. [229]

I. Affairs of the Company.

The new purchases of land round our little museum at Sheffield have been made at rather under than over the market price of land in the district; and they will enable me, as I get more funds, to extend the rooms of the museum under skylight as far as I wish. I did not want to buy so soon; but Fors giving me the opportunity, I must take it at her hand. Our cash accounts will in future be drawn up, as below, by our Companion, Mr. Rydings, to whom all questions, corrections, etc., are to be sent, and all subscriptions under fifty pounds.

[For Cash Account, see next page (230).]

The following letter from Messrs. Tarrant will be seen to be in reply to mine of the 6th June, printed in last Fors. From the tone of it, as well as from careful examination of my legal friends, I perceive that it is out of my power to give the Company a legal status, according to the present law of England, unless it be permitted to gather dividends for itself, instead of store for the nation, and to put its affairs in the hands of a number of persons who know nothing about them, instead of in the hands of one person who is acquainted with them.

Under these circumstances, I consider it to be best that the Companions should settle their own legal status with the lawyers; and this the more, as I do not choose to run the Society into farther expense by the continuance of correspondence between these legal gentlemen and me, without the slightest chance of [231]either party ever understanding the other. Accordingly, I hereby authorize Mr. Robert Somervell, of Hazelthwaite, Windermere, to collect the opinions of the other Companions, (a list of whom I have put in his hands,) and to act in their name, as they shall direct him, respecting the tenure of the Company’s lands and property, now and in future. And I hereby hold myself quit of all responsibility touching such tenure, maintaining simply the right of the Master of the Company to direct their current expenditures. [230]

[231]

“Re ST. GEORGE’S COMPANY.
“2, Bond Court, Walbrook, London,
“31st May, 1876.

“Dear Sir,—We have carefully considered the points raised in your letter to us of the 6th inst., and have also consulted Mr. Barber upon them, and with reference thereto we advise you that the law stands shortly thus:—by the 13th Eliz., c. 5, a voluntary settlement of real or personal estate will be void and may be set aside by a creditor of the settlor, upon his showing an intent on the part of the settlor to defraud his creditors; and such an intent may be inferred from the circumstances. The Bankruptcy Act 1869 (32 and 33 Vict., c. 71) contains a still more stringent provision where the voluntary settlor is a trader. These are liabilities and risks which your association cannot avoid; but they are more imaginary than real, as the donors of land to the Company are not likely to make a voluntary gift for the purpose of defeating their creditors. By the 27th Eliz., c. 4, a voluntary gift or settlement of real estate, unless it be in favour of a charity, will be avoided by a subsequent bonâ fide sale for value, even though the purchaser have notice of the voluntary settlement. This, too, is an ordinary risk from which you cannot escape, unless you are willing to submit to the jurisdiction of the Charity Commissioners. It does not often happen that a person who has made a voluntary [232]settlement of real estate seeks to stultify his own act by a subsequent sale of the same estate, but the payment of a small consideration, or even matter ex post facto, would prevent the deed being voluntary, and the risk is not a very serious one.

“We do not recollect Mr. Baker’s name, and we find no mention of it in any of your letters to us: we think you must have meant Mr. Talbot, with whose solicitors we were in communication as to some cottages and land, and it was arranged that that matter should stand over until the St. George’s Company was constituted.

“As to the writing out of the memorandum and rules for signature of the Companions—the case is this: you receive donations from people who give them to you on the faith of a certain scheme of yours being duly carried out; it is therefore necessary that the leading features of that scheme should be reduced to writing, in order that there may be no misunderstanding between the givers and receivers of these donations as to the objects to which they are devoted. The signatures of the Companions are a feature of your published scheme, and in addition will be useful to show who are the acknowledged Companions having a direct interest in it—the right to elect and control the action of the Master, elect Trustees, etc., etc.; and the signatures will be the evidence of the deliberate submission of the Companions to be bound by the rules to which they subscribe their names.

“But all this will not make the St. George’s Company other than a voluntary association of persons which the law will not recognize as a corporation.

“The Companions of St. George will be capable of holding land, but not as the St. George’s Company,—that is, not as a corporation. Land must be held by or for them as individuals. You may have a piece of land conveyed to, say two hundred Companions; naming each of them; but for the sake of convenience [233]you would have it conveyed to two or three who should hold it upon trust for the Companions generally.

“You can only obtain the countenance and supervision of the law for your Company on certain conditions, and when you came to us we were careful to explain this to you. You at once told us the conditions would not do for your Company, therefore we have had to do the best we could for you, treating your Company as an association without the countenance and supervision of the law.

“Forgive us for quoting from a letter of yours to us of the 27th May, 1875. ‘Mr. Barber’s notion is the popular one of a Mob of Directors. But St. George’s Company must have only one Master. They may dismiss him at their pleasure, but they must not bother him. I am going to draw up a form myself, and submit it to Mr. Barber for criticism and completion.’ We think you may rest satisfied with matters as they are.

“We remain, dear Sir,
“Yours very truly,
“Tarrant & Mackrell.

“John Ruskin, Esq.
“Brantwood, Coniston, Lancashire.”

II. Affairs of the Master.

[234]

a and b. The first of these bills is for a sealskin jacket; the second for a gold and pearl frame to a miniature. Respecting my need for these articles, I have more to say when my lecture on Jewels can be got published: it is fine weather just now, and I can’t see to it.

c. In 1871, in one of my walks at Abingdon, (see Fors, Letters IV. and VI.,) I saw some ragged children playing by the roadside on the bank of a ditch, and gathering what buttercups they could find. Watching them a little while, I at last asked what they were doing. ‘This is my garden,’ answered a little girl about nine years old. ‘Well, but gardens ought to be of use; this is only full of buttercups. Why don’t you plant some strawberries in it?’ ‘I have none to plant.’ ‘If you had a little garden of your own, and some to plant, would you take care of them?’ ‘That I would.’ Thereupon I told her to come and ask for me at the Crown and Thistle, and with my good landlady Mrs. Wonnacott’s help, rented a tiny piece of ground for her. Her father and mother have since died; and her brothers and sisters (four, in all,) are in the Union, at Abingdon. I did not like to let this child go there too; so I’ve sent her to learn shepherding at a kindly shepherd’s; close to Arundel, on the farm of the friend whose son (with perhaps a little help from his sister) took me out foxhunting; and examined the snail-shells for me. This ten pounds is for her board, etc., till she can be made useful.

d. I had settled my servant Crawley, with his wife and his three children, in a good house here at my gate. He spent his savings in furnishing it, in a much more costly manner than I thought quite proper; but that, (as I then supposed,) was his affair, more than mine. His wife died last year: and now both he and I think he will be more useful to me at Oxford than Coniston. So I send him to Oxford,—but have to pay him for his house-furniture, which is very provoking and tiresome, and the kind of expense one does not calculate on. The curious troublesomeness [235]of Fors to me in all business matters has always been one of the most grotesque conditions of my life. The names of Warren and Jones appear for the last time in my accounts, for I have had to give up my tea-shop, owing to the (too surely mortal) illness of my active old servant, Harriet Tovey,—a great grief to me, no less than an utter stop to my plans in London.

III. I somewhat regret, for my friend’s sake, that he desires me to print the subjoined letter in its entirety, if at all. I must print his answer to my question about Usury, for which I am heartily grateful to him, for reference in next Fors; and can only therefore do as he bids me with the rest, which he has written more hastily than is his habit. What answer it seems to me to need will be found in the attached notes.

“Dear Mr. Ruskin,—It did not need your kind letters by the post to assure me that the rebuke pronounced on me by Fors in June was meant in the most friendly spirit—for my good and that of all men. Fors set me thinking, and, as you urged me to say what I thought, I began to write you a letter, partly to show that I am not such so repulsive a person as you paint, (a) or at least that it is not the fault of Comte if I am; partly to show that, whilst agreeing with you very much about modern life, I find other reasons for trusting that the world as a whole improves. I owe you, and the age owes you, profound gratitude for much noble teaching; and it is very sad to me to find you reviling (b) other teachers to whom we owe much, and who know a thousand things about which you have told us nothing. And indiscriminate abuse of all that the human race has now become, wounds my ear as if I heard one cursing our own fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters. If you believe that ‘the entire system of modern life is corrupted [236]with the ghastliest forms of injustice and untruth,’ I wonder that you believe in God, or any future, in effort at all, or in anything but despair. (c)

“But my letter to you grew at last to such a length that I must find for it another place, and you or any reader of Fors who may take the trouble to look, may see what I wish to put to you in the ‘Fortnightly Review.’ I wanted especially to point out that the impression you have conveyed about Comte and his teaching is almost exactly the contrary of the truth. You speak as if Comte were a physiologist, (d) mostly occupied with frogs and lice, whereas he is mostly occupied with history, morality, and religion; as if he insisted on the origin of man from the protozoa, whereas no one has more earnestly repudiated such speculations; as if he claimed political and public careers for women, whereas no one has said more against everything of the kind; as if he looked on modern industrial and social life with admiration, whereas he preaches a regeneration of our lives far more searching than any which you even contemplate; lastly, you speak of him and his students as if they were forbidden all sympathy with the spirit of ages past, whereas the reverence which Comte has expressed for the Middle Age at its best, its religion, its chivalry, its poetry, and its art, far exceeds in depth and completeness of spiritual insight even all the fine things which you yourself have taught us.

“Now I ask you, who love the very soul of truth, to repair an injustice which you have done in representing Comte (e) to teach quite the contrary of what you will find, if you turn to his books, that he does teach. I give a trifling instance. You write as if it were sheer impertinence in me, a student of positivism, (f) to allude to a mediæval building or speak of a tracery. Now the truth is that some of Comte’s profoundest thoughts relate to the moral and spiritual meaning of these sacred relics; and for my own part, though I know nothing of [237]the matter, some of the best seasons of my life have been given to companionship with these most sublime monuments, and study of the ‘writing on the wall,’—or all that men have spared.

“I say nothing about others whose views you may wish to class under the general title ‘Evolution,’ or of a lady whom I am sorry to see you speak of as ‘Cobbe.’ I have never shared all the opinions of those to whom you allude, and they are not followers of Comte. I shall say nothing about them; though I should like to know on what grounds you think yourself entitled to call Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. John Stuart Mill—geese. (g) The letter addressed to me in Fors has reference to Positivism, or it should have been addressed to some one else; and I assure you that every one of the doctrines which you ascribe to Positivists are not held by them at all, but quite the contrary are held.

“Whether the world is wholly worse than it was of old, is a very big matter on which I cannot now enter. I do not think it can be settled by statutes, old MSS., or bits from the poets. Thought and life are very wide; and I will listen to the judgment only of those who have patiently weighed the whole of both. (h) The grandest times of art are often those of especial vileness in life and society; and the grandest times of one art are sometimes those of utter decadence in another art, even in the same people and place. When the Theseus was carved, Aristophanes gives us the domestic and public life of the Athenians, and it has its dark side. Titian was the contemporary of Palladio, and also of Philip II.; Milton of Sir Peter Lely and Louis XIV.; so too were Bach and Mozart contemporaries of Greuze and Louis XV. I don’t quite see what is to be made of these violent contrasts. And by the way, I wish you would work out for us the bearing of musical art on the social and moral life of various ages. It always seemed to me you omitted music. [238]

“Now I will try to answer your questions of law about Usury. There is no such thing as usury in law at all,—that is to say, there is no rate of interest above which the lending of money is criminal or unlawful. By the 17 and 18 Vict., c. 90, (passed in 1854,) “all existing laws against usury shall be repealed.” (Caps. mine.) There are a great many cases where courts of law interfere in bargains which seem to them unfair or unreasonable. But they all arise out of the special relations of the parties, and it would take a volume to tell you what these may be. For more than twenty years, as I suppose every one knows who reads a newspaper, there has been known to the law no lawful rate of interest which it is punishable to exceed. I cannot imagine for what end you ask me the question. Lawyers do not make the law, be it good or bad; they follow it like policemen or soldiers who obey orders.

“I reserve what else I have to say. I am sure all that you write to me comes from you in the most friendly feeling, as believe me does from me all that I write to you. Your Fors fills me with melancholy each time I read it. For it reminds me how many of those to whom we might look to bring more order, patience, and faith into the world, are occupied in setting us against one another, in making us rebels against our fathers, and all that they have done for us and taught us.

“Ever gratefully and most sincerely yours,
“Frederic Harrison.”

a. I believe there is no other friend, with whom I have had so brief opportunity of intercourse, whom I like so much as I do Mr. Harrison. What reproach this sentence is to me as an artist, I must submit to silently.

b. To ‘revile’ means, in accurate English, to vilify under the influence of passion. It is not an expression which my friend could have used, except thoughtlessly, of any words of mine, uttered of any person living. [239]

c. I do not ‘believe,’—I know, that the entire system of modern life is thus corrupted. But I have long learned to believe in God, without expecting Him to manage everything as I think proper; and I have no occasion for belief in effort, so long as I know the duty of it.

d. Where, and when?

e. The only word I have applied to Comte, in my whole letter, is “unique.” For the justice of which epithet I trusted my friend’s report of him. I have never read a word he has written,—never heard anything about him that interested me,—and never represented, or misrepresented, him, in any manner whatsoever. When I said ‘physiologists,’ I meant physiologists; and no more thought of Comte than of Adam.

f. I did not write to my friend as a ‘student of Positivism,’ for I have no idea what positivism means. I wrote to him as an assertor, in the paper I was reading, of the splendours of Evolution; and therefore ventured to imply, not that it was an impertinence, but an absurdity, in him to linger under the scholastic architecture dimly evolved from the superstition of Magdalen, when he might have disported himself under the commercial architecture more brightly evolved from the moral consciousness of Oriel.

g. Simply because I know a goose when I see one,—and when my friend has himself learned to know geese from swans, he will not think himself ‘entitled’ to call either anything else.

h. Mr. Harrison underlines the word ‘whole.’ I am bound, therefore, to italicize it. Whether my friend will, hereafter, thank me for so faithfully echoing his emphasis on this sentence, my respect for his general common sense makes very doubtful to me. I do not see anything requiring notice in the rest of the letter so far as it regards myself. I seldom flaunt my poor little ragged feathers in my friends’ faces; but must in simplicity [240]confess to my feeling that it is not necessary for the author of ‘Modern Painters’ to defend himself against the charge of uttering “indiscriminate abuse of all that the human race has now become;” nor for the author of ‘Sesame and Lilies,’ to receive lessons in courtesy to women, from modern Anglo-French chivalry, because he chooses to call a Cobbe, a Cobbe, no less plainly than a Plantagenet, a Plantagenet.

IV. “Pious Sentiment.—‘I wish to God we could get a good bloody war somewhere.’ It is not without reluctance that we reproduce these awful words, but they were literally spoken in our hearing in that most sober place of business, Mincing Lane, only a few hours ago. They were spoken by a merchant or broker of gentlemanly appearance and apparent respectability, in a public room, and the most melancholy incident in connection with the utterance is that the atrocious sentiment apparently created no surprise, and was met with no outburst of indignation. We say apparently, for we ourselves were greatly surprised,” (There is nothing whatever to be surprised at, except the frankness of the expression. Modern Liberal Protestantism has always held that you must not kill a man for his creed; but you may, for his money,) “and we felt burning indignation, but we controlled our feelings, and we hope others may have felt as we did, and had equally good reasons for silence. We are accused of taking a pessimist view of mercantile morality and mercantile activity. We commend the expressed wish of an English merchant, publicly expressed, in a public place, where merchants most do congregate, to consideration of those who differ from us in opinion, and we merely place the fact on record without further comment.”—Monetary Gazette, June 14th.

I reprint the paragraph for final illustration to Mr. Harrison of the ‘evolution’ of British character. I wish I had space for [241]some others which the courage of the editor of this excellent journal has exposed; or for the leading article in the same number, which is an admirably temperate and clear estimate of the real value of the work of Adam Smith.

V. Lastly, here is some most valuable evidence from the faithful old friend to whom I wrote, in ‘Time and Tide,’ of the increasing ‘wealth’ of England, which with the example given in the last extract of her increasing morality, may symmetrically close the summary of St. George’s designs, and their cause.

“15, Sunderland Street, Sunderland,
20th June, 1876.

“Dear Sir,—I have read with deep and earnest attention the last small tract of Girdlestone. I feel its tremendous truth, and have long done so too; but there is now a very pressing matter I would like to see gone into, and if possible some remedy proposed for it. It is one I have written many times to you about: I mean the rent question for the poor, the working people. At the present there is a sad depressing trade all over our country, and even in Europe. Yet, despite this awful depression, I note what is termed real estate is now going up gradually in value. I mean property and land. And that in the midst of this very depression and want of all kinds of labour by our workpeople and manufacturers, and in the midst of a tremendous opposition from our foreign competitors; yet nowhere do I see it named in any of our papers in the way I expected to see it treated of: they all seem quite elated with the great advance that has taken place, and the continued activity of all our building trades. Now, it seems to me, here is a question of vital importance that needs some sound information given on it, and some reasons assigned for this strange change in the value of all such property, in a time of such widespread depression of all trade. How are our people and our manufacturers to pay increased rents when there is a depressed trade, [242]and no work for our workmen to do? Our town is now in a sad depressed state—work of all kinds very scarce; yet on all sides I learn the rents are being increased to workmen, manufacturers, and shopkeepers; and I note it also the case in other towns. I would like to see some good report as to the real extent of such advance of property in England. I find the advance in price of hotel, public-house, and such-like property has been something tremendous within these few years, since I wrote you my letters in ‘Time and Tide.’ To me it is something very sad to reflect upon this great change in the value or cost of a house to our workpeople. I find their food, such as butcher’s meat, potatoes, and vegetables, milk, and some other kinds of necessaries, are also increased in price, owing to this advance in rent. So that the outlook for our workpeople, despite all our wealth, is indeed not a very pleasant one, for how are they to tide over this storm with all these necessaries at such prices? I note in the papers the miners of the Forest of Dean in some places are starving. I send you a book:1 you can make any use of it you like. I have here and there marked its pages that I thought might serve in some measure to awaken an interest in this question of the workpeople, versus the rise in the value of their necessaries in dull times.

“Yours respectfully,
“Thomas Dixon.”

[243]

I find that the letter which I wrote in the Fors of May to those two children, generally pleases the parents and guardians of children. Several nice ones ask me to print it separately: I have done so; and commend it, to-day, to the attention of the parents and guardians also. For the gist of it is, that the children are told to give up all they have, and never to be vexed. That is the first Rule of St. George, as applied to children,—to hold their childish things for God, and never to mind losing anything.

But the parents and guardians are not yet, it seems to me, well aware that St. George’s law is the same for grown-up people as for little ones. To hold all they have,—all their grown-up things,—for God, and never to mind losing anything,—silver or gold, house or lands, son or daughter;—law seldom so much as even attempted to be observed! And, indeed, circumstances have changed, since I wrote that Fors, which have [244]caused me to consider much how curious it is that when good people lose their own son or daughter, even though they have reason to think, God has found what they have lost, they are greatly vexed about it: but if they only hear of other people’s losing their sons or daughters,—though they have reason to think God has not found them, but that the wild beasts of the wilderness have torn them,—for such loss they are usually not vexed in anywise. To-day, nevertheless, I am not concerned with the stewardship of these spirit-treasures, but only with the stewardship of money or lands, and proper manner of holding such by Christians. For it is important that the accepted Companions should now understand that although, in creed, I ask only so much consent as may include Christian, Jew, Turk, and Greek,—in conduct, the Society is to be regulated at least by the Law of Christ. It may be, that as we fix our laws in further detail, we may add some of the heavier yokes of Lycurgus, or Numa, or John the Baptist: and, though the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and turning water into wine, we may think it needful to try how some of us like living on locusts, or wild honey, or Spartan broth. But at least, I repeat, we are here, in England, to obey the law of Christ, if nothing more.

Now the law of Christ about money and other forms of personal wealth, is taught, first in parables, in which He likens himself to the masters of this world, and [245]explains the conduct which Christians should hold to Him, their heavenly Master, by that which they hold on earth, to earthly ones.

He likens himself, in these stories, several times, to unkind or unjust masters, and especially to hard and usurious ones. And the gist of the parables in each case is, “If ye do so, and are thus faithful to hard and cruel masters, in earthly things, how much more should ye be faithful to a merciful Master, in heavenly things?”

Which argument, evil-minded men wrest, as they do also the other scriptures, to their own destruction. And instead of reading, for instance, in the parable of the Usurer, the intended lesson of industry in the employment of God’s gifts, they read in it a justification of the crime which, in other parts of the same scripture, is directly forbidden. And there is indeed no doubt that, if the other prophetic parts of the Bible be true, these stories are so worded that they may be touchstones of the heart. They are nets, which sift the kindly reader from the selfish. The parable of the Usurer is like a mill sieve:—the fine flour falls through it, bolted finer; the chaff sticks in it.

Therefore, the only way to understand these difficult parts of the Bible, or even to approach them with safety, is first to read and obey the easy ones. Then the difficult ones all become beautiful and clear:—otherwise they remain venomous enigmas, with a Sphinx of [246]destruction provoking false souls to read them, and ruining them in their own replies.

Now the orders, “not to lay up treasures for ourselves on earth,” and to “sell that we have, and give alms,” and to “provide ourselves bags which wax not old,” are perfectly direct, unmistakable,—universal; and while we are not at all likely to be blamed by God for not imitating Him as a Judge, we shall assuredly be condemned by Him for not, under Judgment, doing as we were bid. But even if we do not feel able to obey these orders, if we must and will lay up treasures on earth, and provide ourselves bags with holes in them,—God may perhaps still, with scorn, permit us in our weakness, provided we are content with our earthly treasures, when we have got them, and don’t oppress our brethren, and grind down their souls with them. We may have our old bag about our neck, if we will, and go to heaven like beggars;—but if we sell our brother also, and put the price of his life in the bag, we need not think to enter the kingdom of God so loaded. A rich man may, though hardly, enter the kingdom of heaven without repenting him of his riches; but not the thief, without repenting his theft; nor the adulterer, without repenting his adultery; nor the usurer, without repenting his usury.

The nature of which last sin, let us now clearly understand, once for all.

Mr. Harrison’s letter, published in the Fors for June, [247]is perhaps no less valuable as an evidence of the subtlety with which this sin has seized upon and paralyzed the public mind, (so that even a man of Mr. Harrison’s general intelligence has no idea why I ask a question about it,) than as a clear statement of the present condition of the law, produced by the usurers who are ‘law-makers’ for England, though lawyers are not.

Usury is properly the taking of money for the loan or use of anything, (over and above what pays for wear and tear,) such use involving no care or labour on the part of the lender. It includes all investments of capital whatsoever, returning ‘dividends,’ as distinguished from labour wages, or profits. Thus anybody who works on a railroad as platelayer, or stoker, has a right to wages for his work; and any inspector of wheels or rails has a right to payment for such inspection; but idle persons who have only paid a hundred pounds towards the road-making, have a right to the return of the hundred pounds,—and no more. If they take a farthing more, they are usurers. They may take fifty pounds for two years, twenty-five for four, five for twenty, or one for a hundred. But the first farthing they take more than their hundred, be it sooner or later, is usury.

Again, when we build a house, and let it, we have a right to as much rent as will return us the wages of our labour, and the sum of our outlay. If, as in ordinary cases, not labouring with our hands or head, [248]we have simply paid—say £1000—to get the house built, we have a right to the £1000 back again at once, if we sell it; or, if we let it, to £500 rent during two years, or £100 rent during ten years, or £10 rent during a hundred years. But if, sooner or later, we take a pound more than the thousand, we are usurers.

And thus in all other possible or conceivable cases, the moment our capital is ‘increased’ by having lent it, be it but in the estimation of a hair, that hair’s-breadth of increase is usury, just as much as stealing a farthing is theft, no less than stealing a million.

But usury is worse than theft, in so far as it is obtained either by deceiving people, or distressing them; generally by both: and finally by deceiving the usurer himself, who comes to think that usury is a real increase, and that money can grow of money; whereas all usury is increase to one person only by decrease to another; and every grain of calculated Increment to the Rich, is balanced by its mathematical equivalent of Decrement to the Poor. The Rich have hitherto only counted their gain; but the day is coming, when the Poor will also count their loss,—with political results hitherto unparalleled.

For instance, my good old hairdresser at Camberwell came to me the other day, very uncomfortable about his rent. He wanted a pound or two to make it up; and none of his customers wanted their hair cut. I gave him the pound or two,—with the result, I [249]hope my readers have sagacity enough to observe, of distinct decrement to me, as increment to the landlord; and then inquired of him, how much he had paid for rent, during his life. On rough calculation, the total sum proved to be between 1500 and 1700 pounds. And after paying this sum,—earned, shilling by shilling, with careful snippings, and studiously skilful manipulation of tongs,—here is my poor old friend, now past sixty, practically without a roof over his head;—just as roofless in his old age as he was in the first days of life,—and nervously wandering about Peckham Rye and East Norwood, in the east winter winds, to see if, perchance, any old customers will buy some balm for their thinning locks—and give him the blessed balm of an odd half-crown or two, to rent shelter for his own, for three months more.

Now, supposing that £1500 of his had been properly laid out, on the edification of lodgings for him, £500 should have built him a serviceable tenement and shop; another £500 have met the necessary repairing expenses for forty years; and at this moment he ought to have had his efficient freehold cottage, with tile and wall right weatherproof, and a nice little nest-egg of five hundred pounds in the Bank, besides. But instead of this, the thousand pounds has gone in payment to slovenly builders, each getting their own percentage, and doing as bad work as possible, under the direction of landlords paying for as little as possible [250]of any sort of work. And the odd five hundred has gone into the landlord’s pocket. Pure increment to him; pure decrement to my decoratively laborious friend. No gain ‘begotten’ of money; but simple subtraction from the pocket of the labouring person, and simple addition to the pocket of the idle one.

I have no mind to waste the space of Fors in giving variety of instances. Any honest and sensible reader, if he chooses, can think out the truth in such matters for himself. If he be dishonest, or foolish, no one can teach him. If he is resolved to find reason or excuse for things as they are, he may find refuge in one lie after another; and, dislodged from each in turn, fly from the last back to the one he began with. But there will not long be need for debate—nor time for it. Not all the lying lips of commercial Europe can much longer deceive the people in their rapidly increasing distress, nor arrest their straight battle with the cause of it. Through what confused noise and garments rolled in blood,—through what burning and fuel of fire, they will work out their victory,—God only knows, nor what they will do to Barabbas, when they have found out that he is a Robber, and not a King. But that discovery of his character and capacity draws very near: and no less change in the world’s ways than the former fall of Feudalism itself.

In the meantime, for those of us who are Christians, our own way is plain. We can with perfect ease ascertain [251]what usury is; and in what express terms forbidden. I had partly prepared, for this Fors, and am able to give, as soon as needful, an analysis of the terms ‘Increase’ and ‘Usury’ throughout the Old and New Testaments. But the perpetual confusion of the English terms when the Greek and Latin are clear, (especially by using the word ‘increase’ in one place, and ‘generation’ in another, at the English translator’s pleasure,) renders the matter too intricate for the general reader, though intensely interesting to any honest scholar. I content myself, therefore, with giving the plain Greek and plain English of Leviticus xxv. 35 to 37.1

Ἐὰν δὲ πένηται ὁ ἀδελφός σου, καὶ ἀδυνατήσῃ ταῖς χερσὶν αὐτοῦ παρὰ σοὶ, ἀντιλήψῃ αὐτοῦ ὡς προσηλύτου καὶ παροίκου, καὶ ζήσεται ὁ ἀδελφός σου μετὰ σοῦ.

Οὐ λήψῃ παρ’ αὐτοῦ τόκον, οὐδὲ ἐπὶ πλήθει, καὶ φοβηθήσῃ τὸν θεόν σου· ἐγὼ κύριος· καὶ ζήσεται ὀ ἀδελφός σου μετὰ σοῦ.

Τὸ ἀργύριόν σου οὐ δώσεις αὐτῷ τόκῳ, καὶ ἐπὶ πλεονασμῷ οὐ δώσεις αὐτῲ βρώματά σου·

“And if thy brother be poor, and powerless with his hands, at thy side, thou shalt take his part upon thee, to help him,2 as thy proselyte and thy neighbour; [252]and thy brother shall live with thee. Thou shalt take no usury of him, nor anything over and above, and thou shalt fear thy God. I am the Lord, and thy brother shall live with thee. Thou shalt not give him thy money, for usury; and thou shalt not give him thy food, for increase.”

There is the simple law for all of us;—one of those which Christ assuredly came not to destroy, but to fulfil: and there is no national prosperity to be had but in obedience to it.

How we usurers are to live, with the hope of our gains gone, is precisely the old temple of Diana question. How Robin Hood or Cœur de Lion were to live without arrow or axe, would have been as strange a question to them, in their day. And there are many amiable persons who will not directly see their way, any more than I do myself, to an honest life; only, let us be sure that this we are leading now is a dishonest one; and worse, (if Dante and Shakspeare’s mind on the matter are worth any heed, of which more in due time,) being neither more nor less than a spiritual manner of cannibalism, which, so long as we persist in, every word spoken in Scripture of those who “eat my people as they eat bread,” is spoken directly of us.3 It may be an encouragement to some [253]of us—especially those evangelically bred—in weaning ourselves slowly from such habits, to think of our dear old converted friend, Friday. We need not fear our power of becoming good Christians yet, if we will: so only that we understand, finally and utterly, that all gain, increase, interest, or whatever else you call it or think it, to the lender of capital, is loss, decrease, and dis-interest, to the borrower of capital. Every farthing we, who lend the tool, make, the borrower of the tool loses. And all the idiotical calculations of what money comes to, in so many years, simply ignore the debit side of the book, on which the Labourer’s Deficit is precisely equal to the Capitalist’s Efficit. I saw an estimate made by some blockhead in an American paper, the other day, of the weight of gold which a hundred years’ ‘interest’ on such and such funds would load the earth with! Not even of wealth in that solid form, could the poor wretch perceive so much of the truth as that the gold he put on the earth above, he must dig out of the earth below! But the mischief in real life is far deeper on the [254]negative side, than the good on the positive. The debt of the borrower loads his heart, cramps his hands, and dulls his labour. The gain of the lender hardens his heart, fouls his brain, and puts every means of mischief into his otherwise clumsy and artless hands.

But here, in good time, is one example of honest living sent me, worth taking grave note of.

In my first inaugural lecture on Art at Oxford, given in the theatre, (full crowded to hear what first words might be uttered in the University on so unheard-of a subject,) I closed by telling my audience—to the amusement of some, the offence of others, and the disapproval of all,—that the entire system of their art-studies must be regulated with a view to the primal art, which many of them would soon have to learn, that of getting their food out of the Ground, or out of the Sea.

Time has worn on; and, last year, a Christ-Church man, an excellent scholar, came to talk with me over his brother’s prospects in life, and his own. For himself, he proposed, and very earnestly, considering his youth and gifts, (lying, as far as I could judge, more towards the rifle-ground than in other directions,) to go into the Church: but for his brother, he was anxious, as were all his relatives;—said brother having broken away from such modes of living as the relatives held orthodox, and taken to catching and potting of salmon on the Columbia River; having farther transgressed all the proprieties of civilized society by providing himself violently with the [255]‘capital’ necessary for setting up in that line of business, and ‘stealing a boat.’ How many boats, with nine boilers each in them, the gentlemen of Her Majesty’s navy construct annually with money violently abstracted out of my poor pockets, and those of other peaceful labourers,—boats not to catch salmon with, or any other good thing, but simply to amuse themselves, and blow up stokers with,—civilized society may perhaps in time learn to consider. In the meantime, I consoled my young St. Peter as well as I could for his brother’s carnal falling away; represented to him that, without occasional fishing for salmon, there would soon be no men left to fish for; and that even this tremendous violation of the eighth commandment, to the extent of the abstraction of a boat, might not perchance, with due penitence, keep the young vagabond wholly hopeless of Paradise; my own private opinion being that the British public would, on the whole, benefit more by the proceedings of the young pirate, if he provided them annually with a sufficient quantity of potted salmon, than by the conscientious, but more costly, ministry of his brother, who, provided with the larger boat-apparatus of a nave, and the mast of a steeple, proposed to employ this naval capital only in the provision of potted talk.

And finding that, in spite of the opinion of society, there were still bowels of mercies in this good youth, yearning after his brother, I got him to copy for me some of the brother’s letters from the Columbia River, [256]confessing his piratical proceedings, (as to which I, for one, give him a Christian man’s absolution without more ado;) and account of his farther life in those parts—life which appears to me, on the whole, so brave, exemplary, and wise, that I print the letters as chief article of this month’s correspondence; and I am going to ask the boy to become a Companion of St. George forthwith, and send him a collar of the Order, (as soon as we have got gold to make collars of,) with a little special pictorial chasing upon it, representing the Miraculous Draught of Fishes. [257]

I have just been down to Barmouth to see the tenants on the first bit of ground,—noble crystalline rock, I am thankful to say,—possessed by St. George in the island.

I find the rain coming through roofs, and the wind through walls, more than I think proper, and have ordered repairs; and for some time to come, the little rents of these cottages will be spent entirely in the bettering of them, or in extending some garden ground, fenced with furze hedge against the west wind by the most ingenious of our tenants.

And in connection with this first—however small—beginning under my own eyes of St. George’s work,—(already some repairs had been made by my direction, under the superintendence of the donor of the land, Mrs. Talbot, before I could go to see the place)—I must state again clearly our St. George’s principle of rent. It is taken first as the acknowledgment [276]of the authority of the Society over the land, and in the amount judged by the Master to be just, according to the circumstances of the person and place, for the tenant to pay as a contribution to the funds of the Society. The tenant has no claim to the return of the rent in improvements on his ground or his house; and I order the repairs at Barmouth as part of the Company’s general action, not as return of the rent to the tenant. The reader will thus see that our so-called ‘rents’ are in fact taxes laid on the tenants for the advancement of the work of the Company. And all so-called rents are, in like manner, taxes laid on the labourer for the advancement of the work of his landlord. If that work be beneficial, on the whole, to the estate, and of all who live on it, the rents are on a right footing; but if they are abstracted by the landlord to his own private uses, he is merely another form of the old mediæval Knight of Evilstone, living as hawk in eyrie.

It chanced, while I set this work on foot at Barmouth, that a paragraph was sent me out of a Carlisle paper, giving the information that all Lord Lonsdale’s tenants have received notice to quit, that the farms might be re-valued. I requested my correspondent to ascertain for me the manner of the holdings on Lord Lonsdale’s estates;—his reply is the third article in our correspondence this month, and I beg to recommend it to the reader’s most earnest attention. What it says of [277]rents, with the exception indicated in my note, is right; and cannot be more tersely or clearly expressed. What it says of ground-produce is only partially right. To discover another America at our own doors would not be any advantage to us;—nor even to make England bigger. We have no business to want England to be bigger, any more than the world to be bigger. The question is not, for us, how much land God ought to have given us; but to fill the land He has given us, with the wisest and best inhabitants we can. I could give a plan, if I chose, with great ease, for the maintenance of a greatly increased quantity of inhabitants, on iron scaffolding, by pulverizing our mountains, and strewing the duly pulverized and, by wise medical geology, drugged, materials, over the upper stages; carrying on our present ingenious manufactures in the dark lower stories. But the arrangement, even if it could be at once achieved, would be of no advantage to England.

Whereas St. George’s arrangements, which are to take the hills, streams, and fields that God has made for us; to keep them as lovely, pure, and orderly as we can;1 to gather their carefully cultivated fruit in due season; and if our children then multiply so that we cannot feed them, to seek other lands to cultivate in like manner,—these arrangements, I repeat, will be found [278]very advantageous indeed, as they always have been; wheresoever even in any minor degree enforced. In some happy countries they have been so, many a long year already; and the following letter from a recent traveller in one of them, may further illustrate the description given in a Fors of early date, of the felicity verily and visibly to be secured by their practice.

“Salzburg, July 30, 1876.

“Dear Professor Ruskin,—I have long intended to write to you, but the mountain of matters I had to tell you has increased till Pelion is piled upon Ossa within my mind, and so I must confine myself to one or two points. In the Black Forest, and more especially in remote mountain valleys of Tyrol, I have found the people living more or less according to principles laid down for the Company of St. George. I have seen the rules so much decried, and even ridiculed, in England, wrought into the whole life of the people. One may still find villages and communes where lawsuits are impossible—a head-man of their own deciding all disputes; where the simplest honesty and friendliness are all but universal, and the stranger is taken in only in the better sense of the phrase; where the nearest approach to steam power is the avalanche of early summer; where there are no wheeled vehicles, and all burthens are carried on the backs of men and mules,” (my dear friend, I really don’t want people to do without [279]donkey-carts, or pony-chaises; nay, I was entirely delighted at Dolgelly, the other day, to meet a four-in-hand coach—driven by the coachman’s daughter;) “where rich and poor must fare alike on the simple food and cheap but sound wine of the country; where the men still carve wood, and the women spin and weave, during the long hours of winter; and where the folk still take genuine delight in picturesque dress, and daily church-going, and have not reduced both to the dreary felon’s uniform of English respectability. With these unconscious followers of Ruskin, and Companions of St. George, I formed deep friendships; and for me, if I ever revisit the wild recesses of the Œtzthal, it will almost be like going amongst my own people and to my own home. Indeed, wherever I left the beaten track of tourists, and the further I left it, so did the friendliness of my entertainers increase. It was evident they regarded me not as a mere purse-bearing animal, but as an argosy of quite a different sort—a human spirit coming from afar, from a land ‘belonging,’ as one of them conjectured, ‘to Spain,’ and laden with all kinds of new knowledge and strange ideas, of which they would gladly have some share. And so towards the close of a dinner, or supper, the meek-eyed hostess would come and sit beside me, hoping I had enjoyed a ‘happy meal;’ and after a complimentary sip from my glass, ask me all sorts of delightful and simple questions about myself, and my family, and my country. [280]Or the landlord would come sometimes,—alas, at the very beginning of a meal,—and from huge pipe bowl, wonderfully painted with Crucifixion or Madonna, blow clouds of anything but incense smoke. But the intention of honouring and amusing me were none the less apparent.”

With my friend’s pleasant days among this wise and happy people, I will forthwith compare the very unpleasant day I spent myself on my journey to Barmouth, among unwise and wretched ones; one incident occurring in it being of extreme significance. I had driven from Brantwood in early morning down the valley of the Crake, and took train first at the Ulverston station, settling myself in the corner of a carriage next the sea, for better prospect thereof. In the other corner was a respectable, stolid, middle-aged man reading his paper.

I had left my Coniston lake in dashing ripples under a south wind, thick with rain; but the tide lay smooth and silent along the sands; melancholy in absolute pause of motion, nor ebb nor flow distinguishable;—here and there, among the shelves of grey shore, a little ruffling of their apparent pools marked stray threadings of river-current.

At Grange, talking loud, got in two young coxcombs; who reclined themselves on the opposite cushions. One had a thin stick, with which, in a kind of St. Vitus’s dance, partly affectation of nonchalance, partly real fever [281]produced by the intolerable idleness of his mind and body, he rapped on the elbow of his seat, poked at the button-holes of the window strap, and switched his boots, or the air, all the way from Grange to the last station before Carnforth,—he and his friend talking yacht and regatta, listlessly;—the St. Vitus’s, meantime, dancing one expressing his opinion that “the most dangerous thing to do on these lakes was going before the wind.” The respectable man went on reading his paper, without notice of them. None of the three ever looked out of the windows at sea or shore. There was not much to look at, indeed, through the driving, and gradually closer-driven, rain,—except the drifting about of the seagulls, and their quiet dropping into the pools, their wings kept open for an instant till their breasts felt the water well; then closing their petals of white light, like suddenly shut water flowers.

The two regatta men got out, in drenching rain, on the coverless platform at the station before Carnforth, and all the rest of us at Carnforth itself, to wait for the up train. The shed on the up-line side, even there, is small, in which a crowd of third-class passengers were packed close by the outside drip. I did not see one, out of some twenty-five or thirty persons, tidily dressed, nor one with a contented and serenely patient look. Lines of care, of mean hardship, of comfortless submission, of gnawing anxiety, or ill-temper, characterized every face. [282]

The train came up, and my poor companions were shuffled into it speedily, in heaps. I found an empty first-class carriage for myself: wondering how long universal suffrage would allow itself to be packed away in heaps, for my convenience.

At Lancaster, a father and daughter got in; presumably commercial. Father stoutly built and firm-featured, sagacious and cool. The girl hard and common; well dressed, except that her hat was cocked too high on her hair. They both read papers all the way to Warrington. I was not myself employed much better; the incessant rain making the windows a mere wilderness of dirty dribblings; and neither Preston nor Wigan presenting anything lively to behold, I had settled myself to Mrs. Brown on Spelling Bees, (an unusually forced and poor number of Mrs. Brown, by the way).

I had to change at Warrington for Chester. The weather bettered a little, while I got a cup of tea and slice of bread in the small refreshment room; contemplating, the while, in front of me, the panels of painted glass on its swinging doors, which represented two troubadours, in broadly striped blue and yellow breeches, purple jackets, and plumed caps; with golden-hilted swords, and enormous lyres. Both had soft curled moustaches, languishing eyes, open mouths, and faultless legs. Meanwhile, lounged at the counter behind me, much bemused in beer, a perfect example of the special type of youthful blackguard now developing generally [283]in England; more or less blackly pulpous and swollen in all the features, and with mingled expression of intense grossness and intense impudence,—half pig, half jackdaw.

There got in with me, when the train was ready, a middle-class person of commercial-traveller aspect, who had possessed himself of a ‘Graphic’ from the news-boy; and whom I presently forgot, in examining the country on a line new to me, which became quickly, under gleams of broken sunlight, of extreme interest. Azure-green fields of deep corn; undulations of sandstone hill, with here and there a broken crag at the edge of a cutting; presently the far glittering of the Solway-like sands of Dee, and rounded waves of the Welsh hills on the southern horizon, formed a landscape more fresh and fair than I have seen for many a day, from any great line of English rail. When I looked back to my fellow-traveller, he was sprawling all his length on the cushion of the back seat, with his boots on his ‘Graphic,’—not to save the cushions assuredly, but in the foul modern carelessness of everything which we have ‘done with’ for the moment;—his face clouded with sullen thought, as of a person helplessly in difficulty, and not able to give up thinking how to avoid the unavoidable.

In a minute or two more I found myself plunged into the general dissolution and whirlpool of porters, passengers, and crook-boned trucks, running round corners [284]against one’s legs, of the great Chester station. A simply-dressed upper-class girl of sixteen or seventeen, strictly and swiftly piloting her little sister through the populace, was the first human creature I had yet seen, on whom sight could rest without pain. The rest of the crowd was a mere dismal fermentation of the Ignominious.

The train to Ruabon was crowded, and I was obliged to get into a carriage with two cadaverous sexagenarian spinsters, who had been keeping the windows up, all but a chink, for fear a drop of rain or breath of south wind should come in, and were breathing the richest compound of products of their own indigestion. Pretending to be anxious about the construction of the train, I got the farther window down, and my body well out of it; then put it only half-way up when the train left, and kept putting my head out without my hat; so as, if possible, to impress my fellow-passengers with the imminence of a collision, which could only be averted by extreme watchfulness on my part. Then requesting, with all the politeness I could muster, to be allowed to move a box with which they had occupied the corner-seat—“that I might sit face to the air”—I got them ashamed to ask that the window might be shut up again; but they huddled away into the opposite corner to make me understand how they suffered from the draught. Presently they got out two bags of blue grapes, and [285]ate away unanimously, availing themselves of my open window to throw out rolled-up pips and skins.

General change, to my extreme relief, as to their’s, was again required at Ruabon, effected by a screwing backwards and forwards, for three-quarters of an hour, of carriages which one was expecting every five minutes to get into; and which were puffed and pushed away again the moment one opened a door, with loud calls of ‘Stand back there.’ A group of half a dozen children, from eight to fourteen—the girls all in straw hats, with long hanging scarlet ribands—were more or less pleasant to see meanwhile; and sunshine through the puffs of petulant and cross-purposed steam, promised a pleasant run to Llangollen.

I had only the conventional ‘business man with a paper’ for this run; and on his leaving the carriage at Llangollen, was just closing the door, thinking to have both windows at command, when my hand was stayed by the father of a family of four children, who, with their mother and aunt, presently filled the carriage, the children fitting or scrambling in anywhere, with expansive kicks and lively struggles. They belonged to the lower middle-class; the mother an ideal of the worthy commonplace, evidently hard put to it to make both ends meet, and wholly occupied in family concerns; her face fixed in the ignoble gravity of virtuous persons to whom their own troublesome households have become monasteries. The father, slightly [286]more conscious of external things, submitting benevolently to his domestic happiness out on its annual holiday. The children ugly, fidgety, and ill-bred, but not unintelligent,—full of questionings, ‘when’ they were to get here, or there? how many rails there were on the line; which side the station was on, and who was to meet them. In such debate, varied by bodily contortions in every direction, they contrived to pass the half-hour which took us through the vale of Llangollen, past some of the loveliest brook and glen scenery in the world. But neither the man, the woman, nor any one of the children, looked out of the window once, the whole way.

They got out at Corwen, leaving me to myself for the run past Bala lake and down the Dolgelly valley; but more sorrowful than of late has been my wont, in the sense of my total isolation from the thoughts and ways of the present English people. For I was perfectly certain that among all the crowd of living creatures whom I had that day seen,—scarlet ribands and all,—there was not one to whom I could have spoken a word on any subject interesting to me, which would have been intelligible to them.

But the first broad sum of fact, for the sake of which I have given this diary, is that among certainly not less than some seven or eight hundred people, seen by me in the course of this day, I saw not one happy face, and several hundreds of entirely miserable ones. [287]The second broad sum of fact is, that out of the few,—not happy,—but more or less spirited and complacent faces I saw, among the lower and the mercantile classes, what life or spirit they had depended on a peculiar cock-on-a-dunghill character of impudence, which meant a total inability to conceive any good or lovely thing in this world or any other: and the third sum of fact is, that in this rich England I saw only eight out of eight hundred persons gracefully dressed, and decently mannered. But the particular sign, and prophetic vision of the day, to me, was the man lying with his boots on his ‘Graphic.’ There is a long article in the ‘Monetary Gazette,’ sent me this morning, on the folly of the modern theory that the nation is suffering from ‘over-production.’ The writer is quite correct in his condemnation of the fallacy in question; but it has not occurred to him, nor to any other writer that I know of on such matters, to consider whether we may not possibly be suffering from over-destruction. If you use a given quantity of steam power and human ingenuity to produce your ‘Graphic’ in the morning, and travel from Warrington to Chester with your boots upon it in the afternoon,—Is the net result, production, my dear editor? The net result is labour with weariness A.M.,—idleness with disgust P.M.,—and nothing to eat next day. And do not think our Warrington friend other than a true type of your modern British employer of industry. The universal British public has [288]no idea of any other use of art, or industry, than he! It reclines everlastingly with its boots on its ‘Graphic.’ ‘To-morrow there will be another,—what use is there in the old?’ Think of the quantity of energy used in the ‘production’ of the daily works of the British press? The first necessity of our lives in the morning,—old rags in the evening! Or the annual works of the British naval architect? The arrow of the Lord’s deliverance in January, and old iron in June! The annual industry of the European soldier,—of the European swindler,—of the European orator,—will you tell me, good Mr. Editor, what it is that they produce? Will you calculate for me, how much of all that is, they destroy?

But even of what we do produce, under some colour or fancy, of service to humanity,—How much of it is of any service to humanity, good Mr. Editor? Here is a little bit of a note bearing on the matter, written last Christmas in a fit of incontrollable provocation at a Christian correspondent’s drawl of the popular sentiment, “living is so very expensive, you know!”

Why, of course it is, living as you do, in a saucepan full of steam, with no potatoes in it!

Here is the first economical fact I have been trying to teach, these fifteen years; and can’t get it, yet, into the desperate, leathern-skinned, death-helmeted skull of this wretched England—till Jael-Atropos drive it down, through skull and all, into the ground;—that you can’t [289]have bread without corn, nor milk without kine; and that being dragged about the country behind kettles won’t grow corn on it; and speculating in stocks won’t feed mutton on it; and manufacturing steel pens, and scrawling lies with them, won’t clothe your backs or fill your bellies, though you scrawl England as black with ink as you have strewed her black with cinders.

Now look here: I am writing in a friend’s house in a lovely bit of pasture country, surrounding what was once a bright bit of purple and golden heath—inlaid as gorse and heather chose to divide their possession of it; and is now a dusty wilderness of unlet fashionable villas, bricks, thistles, and crockery. My friend has a good estate, and lets a large farm; but he can’t have cream to his tea, and has ‘Dorset’ butter.2 If he ever gets any of these articles off his own farm, they are brought to him from London, having been carried there that they may pay toll to the railroad company once as they go up, and again as they come down; and have two chances of helping to smash an excursion train.

Meantime, at the apothecary’s shop in the village, I can buy, besides drugs,—cigars, and stationery; and among other stationery, the ‘College card,’ of “eighteen useful articles,”—namely, Bohemian glass ruler, Bohemian glass penholder, pen-box with gilt and diapered lid, pen-wiper [290]with a gilt tin fern leaf for ornament, pencil, india-rubber, and twelve steel pens,—all stitched separately and neatly on the card; and the whole array of them to be bought for sixpence.

What times!—what civilization!—what ingenuity!—what cheapness!

Yes; but what does it mean? First, that I, who buy the card, can’t get cream to my tea? And secondly, that the unhappy wretches,—Bohemian and other,—glass blowers, iron diggers, pen manufacturers, and the like,—who have made the eighteen useful articles, have sixpence to divide among them for their trouble! What sort of cream have they to their tea?

But the question of questions about it all, is—Are these eighteen articles ‘useful articles’? For what? Here’s a—nominal—‘pencil’ on our ‘College card.’ But not a collegian, that I know of, wants to draw,—and if he did, he couldn’t draw with this thing, which is not a pencil, but some sand and coal-dust jammed in a stick. The ‘india-rubber’ also, I perceive, is not india-rubber; but a composition for tearing up the surface of paper,—useful only to filthy blunderers; the nasty glass-handled things, which will break if I drop them, and cut the housemaid’s fingers, I shall instantly turn out of the house; the pens, for which I bought the card, will perhaps be useful to me, because I have, to my much misery, writing to do: but you, happier animals, who may exist without scratching either paper or your [291]heads,—what is the use of them to you? (N.B. I couldn’t write a word with one of them, after all.)

I must go back to my Warrington friend; for there are more lessons to be received from him. I looked at him, in one sense, not undeferentially. He was, to the extent of his experience, as good a judge of art as I. He knew what his ‘Graphic’ was worth. Pronounced an entirely divine verdict upon it. Put it, beneficently, out of its pictorial pain,—for ever.

Do not think that it is so difficult to know good art from bad. The poorest-minded public cannot rest in its bad possessions,—wants them new, and ever new. I have given my readers, who have trusted me, four art-possessions, which I do not fear their wishing to destroy; and it will be a long while before I wish them to get another. I have too long delayed beginning to tell them why they are good; and one of my Sheffield men asked Mr. Swan the other day what I had commended the Leucothea for,—“he couldn’t see anything in it.” To whom the first answer must be—Did you expect to, then? My good manufacturing friend, be assured there was no more thought of pleasing you when Leucothea was carved, than of pleasing—Ganymede, when Rosalind was christened. Some day you will come to “like her name.”

But, whether you ever come to ‘see anything in it’ or not, be assured that this, and the Lippi, and the Titian, and the Velasquez, are, all four, alike in one [292]quality, which you can respect, even if you do not envy. They are work of men doing their best. And whose pride is in doing their best and most. You modern British workmen’s pride, I find more and more, is in doing ingeniously the worst, and least, you can.

Again: they all four agree in being the work of men trained under true masters, and themselves able to be true masters to others. They belong, therefore, to what are properly called ‘schools’ of art. Whereas your modern British workman recognizes no master; but is, (as the result of his increasing intelligence, according to Mr. Mill,) less and less disposed “to be guided in the way which he should go by any prestige or authority.” The result of which is that every British artist has to find out how to paint as he best can; and usually begins to see his way to it, by the time he is sixty.

Thirdly. They belong to schools which, orderly and obedient themselves, understood the law of order in all things. Which is the chief distinction between Art and Rudeness. And the first aim of every great painter, is to express clearly his obedience to the law of Kosmos, Order, or Symmetry.3 The only perfect work of the four [293]I have given, the Titian, binds itself by this symmetry most severely. Absolutely straight lines of screen behind the Madonna’s head,—a dark head on one side, a dark head on the other; a child on one side, a child on the other; a veil falling one way on one side, a scroll curling the other way on the other; a group of leaves in the child’s right hand balanced by another in the Madonna’s left; two opposed sprays of leaves on the table, and the whole clasped by a single cherry. In the Lippi, the symmetry is lateral; the Madonna fronting the group of the child central, with supporting angel on each side. In the Leucothea, the diminishing magnitudes of the attendant goddesses on the right are answered by the diminishing magnitudes from the seated goddess and the child, to the smallest figure at her knee, which clasps both the sides of the chain.

Lastly, in the Velasquez, the little pyramid of a child, with her three tassels and central brooch, and a chair on each side of her, would have been too symmetrical, but for the interferent light in the dog.

I said just now, the Titian was the only perfect one of the four. Everything there is done with absolute rightness: and you don’t see how. The hair in the Lippi is too stiff,—in the Velasquez, too slight; and one sees that it is drawn in the one, dashed in the other; but by Titian only, ‘painted’—you don’t know how.

I say the Titian is the most perfect. It does not [294]follow that it is the best. There are gifts shown in the others, and feelings, which are not in it; and of which the relative worth may be matter of question. For instance, the Lippi, as I told you before, is a painting wrought in real Religion;—that is to say, in the binding of the heart in obedience to the conceived nature and laws of God.

The Titian is wrought in what Mr. Harrison calls the Religion of Humanity: but ought more accurately to call, the Religion of Manity, (for the English use of the word ‘humane’ is continually making him confuse benevolence with religion,)—that is to say, in the binding of the heart in obedience to the nature and laws of Man.

And, finally, the Velasquez is wrought in the still more developed Modern Religion of Dogity, or obedience of the heart to the nature and laws of Dog; (the lovely little idol, you observe, dominant on velvet throne, as formerly the Madonna). Of which religion, as faithfully held by the brave British Squire, in its widest Catholic form of horse-and-dog-ity, and passionately and tenderly indulged by the devoted British matron in the sectarian limitation of Lapdogity,—there is more to be told than Velasquez taught, or than we can learn, to-day. [295]