476 APPENDIX TO PART II

all our English literature-he alluded to King Alfred. Alfred himself was honoured in France for his writing; and the best writing of that period came from France. It was well known that the French princess Judith, who was Alfred’s stepmother, took great pains to teach him; but it would seem that he had naturally no more taste for study than other children, for it was recorded of him that he lived to twelve years old before he was taught to read. How he was induced to learn was, according to Mr. Sharon Turner, in this wise: “When Alfred was twelve years old, she (Judith) was sitting one day surrounded by her family with a MS. of Saxon poetry in her hands. ... With a happy judgment she proposed it as a gift to him who would be the soonest to learn to read it. The whole incident may have been chance play, but it was fruitful of consequences. The elder princes-one then a king, the other in mature youth or manhood-thought the reward inadequate to the task, and were silent. But the mind of Alfred, captivated by the prospect of information, and pleased with the beautiful decoration of the first letter of the writing, inquired if she actually intended to give it to such of her children as would the soonest learn to understand and repeat it. His mother repeating the promise, with a smile of joy at the question, he took the book, found out an instructor, and learned to read it. When his industry had crowned his wishes with success, he recited it to her. To this important though seemingly trivial incident we owe all the intellectual cultivation and all the literary works of Alfred, and all the benefits which by these he imparted to his countrymen.”¹ In this case the beautiful initial letter was the attraction-a letter, probably, like that which he (the lecturer) had just exhibited as characteristic of the date of Charlemagne. This was the first inducement to study with our English Alfred, and he was not quite sure whether it would not be better generally that children should remain until they were twelve years of age, and then be tempted to read by such inducements as these, rather than that we should go on impressing upon their minds in infancy the enormous fallacy that “A” ever was, or under any circumstances could become, an apple-pie.

4. The main idea of the age of which he was now speaking, however, was that a book was a noble and a sacred thing, to be respected and revered. It became precious because it was written with so much labour and with so much beauty; and then came the idea of its sanctity. It was noble, inasmuch as it was the means of making human thought-the most transient and evanescent of all things-the most permanent of all things. The mountains of the earth would fall sooner than some of the noblest thoughts perpetuated by books would perish. Well, this being the idea of books, which then obtained in men’s minds, they worked, and worked on, to attain greater excellence in their writing, by systematising their colour more and more, until they arrived at a perfect system, which, however, they might have found out long before they did, and which [it] was strange that we ourselves had not discovered. It was strange that those who were familiar with the Bible, wherein they were told that the colours directed to be used for ornamenting the tabernacle were gold (or yellow), and blue, and purple,

¹ [The passage is quoted from Sharon Turner’s History of England, 1839, vol. i. pp. 500-501. For a further reference to it, see below, § 19, p. 493. For a sketch by Ruskin of the Life of Alfred, see The Pleasures of England, §§ 103 seq.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]