356 REVIEWS AND PAMPHLETS ON ART

utter absence of all generous help or encouragement from those who can both measure their toil and appreciate their success, and the shrill, shallow laughter of those who can do neither the one nor the other-these are strangest of all-unimaginable unless they had been experienced.

19. And as if these were not enough, private malice is at work against them, in its own small, slimy way. The very day after I had written my second letter to the Times in the defence of the Pre-Raphaelites, I received an anonymous letter respecting one of them, from some person apparently hardly capable of spelling, and about as vile a specimen of petty malignity as ever blotted paper. I think it well that the public should know this, and so get some insight into the sources of the spirit which is at work against these men: how first roused it is difficult to say, for one would hardly have thought that mere eccentricity in young artists could have excited an hostility so determined and so cruel; hostility which hesitated at no assertion, however impudent. That of the “absence of perspective” was one of the most curious pieces of the hue and cry which began with the Times, and died away in feeble maundering in the Art Union; I contradicted it in the Times-I here contradict it directly for the second time.¹ There was not a single error in perspective in three out of the four pictures in question. But if otherwise, would it have been anything remarkable in them? I doubt if, with the exception of the pictures of David Roberts,² there were one architectural drawing in perspective on the walls of the Academy; I never met but with two men in

¹ [For the reply to the Times, see above, p. 322. The “maundering in the Art Union” refers to an article in the Art Journal for July 1851, headed “The Pre-Raphaelites,” and signed “J. B.” (possibly John Ballantyne, the author of the pamphlet noted above, p. 338). The Art Journal returned Ruskin’s epithet “maundering” in its review of the pamphlet (see above, p. lii. n.) The reference in Ruskin’s note on the next page is to an engraving of the “Pillars of the Piazzetta” (No. 374 in the Tate Gallery) by R. P. Bonington (1801-1828); the Art Journal’s remark on the want of aerial perspective is at p. 192, in the number for July 1851; “J. B.” had referred to Ruskin (p. 185) as “the Under-graduate of Oxford.” For a reply to the charge against Millais’ “Huguenot,” that it was deficient in “aerial perspective,” see Stones of Venice, vol. iii. pp. 59, 401.]

² [For a notice of his architectural drawing, see Modern Painters, vol. i. (Vol. III. p. 223).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]