492 APPENDIX TO PART II

afraid that many of the specimens which he had exhibited were, to some extent, illegible; but that was only because we were not used to them. Probably there were not many persons present who could read Greek or Hebrew, and to them the text of a book in either of these languages would be equally illegible; but that was only because they were unacquainted with the Greek and Hebrew alphabets. If they were to study Greek and Hebrew, the letters would no longer be strange; and so, when they became accustomed to illuminated lettering, it would be read with facility. He had never recommended that every letter, or every initial letter, should be illuminated, but that the illumination should be appropriately introduced to illustrate, not to obscure, the text. There were many present who probably could not read black letter. Here was (exhibiting it) a black-letter manuscript of 1290. It was plain enough to those who were accustomed to it, although to many it would be perfectly illegible. Of all persons he was the last who ought to be charged with desiring to introduce illegibility; for he had published his opinions upon the subject. He had said in his Seven Lamps,-”Place them, therefore (inscriptions), where they will be read, and there only; and let them be plainly written-not turned upside down, nor wrong end first. It is an ill sacrifice to beauty to make that illegible whose only merit is in its sense. Write the Commandments on the church walls, where they may be plainly seen, but do not put a dash and a tail to every letter, and remember that you are an architect, not a writing-master.”¹ His opinions in this respect, therefore, ought not to have been mistaken. If they wanted to see writing perfectly illegible, he would recommend them to go and look at the inscriptions in the Houses of Parliament.

19. Passing from that subject, what he desired to impress upon them was to endeavour to express themselves clearly and legibly in outline; but, above all, truly. The first thing to be done was to understand the difference between a true outline and a false one; and this led him back to the Parisian MS. to which he had previously referred. He was glad that he had been led back to this subject, for he had been told that it had been said of him in a newspaper-he himself never looked at these things, for if he read everything that was said against him, he should have no time for anything else,-but a friend of his had told him that the Morning Chronicle had accused him of knowingly misrepresenting the circumstances of the teaching of Alfred,²-that he had said it was the stepmother of

at a very early step he declared, ‘that he wanted us to teach him how his theories were to be carried out.”’ The rest of the letter shows that Ruskin’s lecture had fallen on some stony ground. The writer much preferred the plain, honest letters supplied by the trade to “birds or animals, whose heads or tails ran a race all round the letter.”]

¹ [See Vol. VIII. p. 147, and the author’s note there.]

² [The reference is to a characteristic letter from E.A. Freeman, which appeared in the Morning Chronicle of November 16. Freeman detected in Ruskin’s passing allusions to Charlemagne and Alfred an intention to poach. “I perceive,” he wrote, “from your paper that Mr. Ruskin in a lecture at the Architectural Museum has been deserting his ordinary subjects of ‘lamps,’ ‘stones,’ and ‘sheepfolds,’ to communicate information about the two greatest sovereigns of Western Europe. Unfortunately Mr. Ruskin’s facts are entirely apocryphal, and his inferences far from trustworthy.” Freeman’s objections were (1) that according to the better authorities,

[Version 0.04: March 2008]