xl INTRODUCTION

early faith, and in the text of the present volume will be found the first passages in his works which were written in a temper different from the exclusive Protestantism that he came in after years to deplore and denounce. Such a passage as that in the third chapter (§ 40) on the Madonna of Murano heralds his subsequent power of sympathy with every kind of sincere religious emotion, and even of sincere agnosticism.¹ As his own views broadened, so did his power of sympathy expand.

Ruskin’s religious exercises were accompanied, it should be added, now as always, by much practical benevolence. “I can this time show you,” he writes to his father (January 16, 1852), “how the money has gone to the last fraction. I have given a great deal in charity. There is not, I think, one man of the lower classes whom I have ever known in Venice who does not come begging, and with as much justness of claim as habitual improvidence can give to any one.” His wife, too, visited the poor and sick, both in the hospitals and in their own homes. Nor were home charities forgotten. In these his father acted as his almoner, and Ruskin sent him the names and addresses of poor and deserving men, struggling artists and others, whom he was to search out and help.

Occasionally in the letters of this period one finds, too, anticipations of those wider social problems-of the unequal distribution of riches and poverty, of luxury and misery, which were afterwards to occupy so much of his time and thoughts:-

“(November 12, 1851.)-I was rather struck yesterday by three paragraphs in Galignani-in parallel columns-so that the eye ranged from one to the other. The first gave an account of a girl aged twenty-one, being found, after lying exposed all night, and having given birth to a dead child, on the banks of the canal near (Maidstone, I think-but some English county town); the second was the fashions for November, with an elaborate account of satin skirts; and the third, a burning to death of a child-or rather, a dying after burning-because the surgeon, without an order from the parish, would neither go to see it nor send it any medicine.”

A note such as this is significant of the social sympathies which informed, as we shall see, some of the most vital and effective passages of the present volume. In after years-and first, prominently, in Sesame and Lilies-Ruskin made much of arguments or appeals from cuttings in the newspapers, arranged by “Fors Clavigera”-by chance, but by chance that hit the nail on the head. During his present sojourn at Venice Ruskin put his thoughts on public affairs into the form of three letters to the Times, dealing severally with the principles of taxation, representation,

¹ See Introduction to The Crown of Wild Olive, and compare Vol. IV. p. 386 n.

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