ADDRESSES ON DECORATIVE COLOUR 493

the Saxon king, a French princess, instead of his own mother, who was an Englishwoman, who induced him to learn to read by exhibiting to him a beautifully illuminated French missal, and promising it as the reward of his success. Now, he would give this advice to all who heard him, and especially to young persons-let them never suspect a man of wilful misrepresentation until they had proof that he had said what he knew to be incorrect. If they did so, they not only insulted the person, but they insulted themselves irreparably. People were often led into misrepresentations and sophistries in the eagerness of argument; but he did not believe, and none but those who were in the habit of misrepresenting could believe, that people would deliberately state a fact one way when they knew it to be another. As it happened, in this case he could have no motive for misrepresentation. He did not care a straw whether it was a French princess or an English princess who was the means of teaching Alfred. That was not his affair, but Sharon Turner’s, whose book he had quoted,¹ and whom he considered an authority on the point. But that in the illuminated works of the thirteenth century France stood pre-eminent, any person acquainted with the subject must be aware. Whenever he entered a museum, or examined any collection of old illuminated writing, if he saw any specimens which were first-rate, he always said they were French; if he saw any MSS. second-rate in character, but still showing great intellectual power, though not wrought up with great refinement, he concluded that it was probably English work; if other specimens showed some intellectual power, but at the same time a great clinging to precedent, then he set them down as German; and if they were irretrievably coarse, he concluded they were Dutch. What was true with regard to MSS. was true also with respect to sculpture and architectural decoration. The best specimen we had of the Gothic architecture of that century was Lincoln Cathedral, and the next was that of Wells.² The specimens of sculpture from Lincoln Cathedral, so justly brought forward by Mr. Cockerell,³ were probably the finest examples that could be found in the country. But although they exhibited great boldness of outline and vigour of invention, they were by no means equal to the architectural sculpture of the French cathedrals of the same period: they were not equal to the compositions at Rheims, Amiens, and especially at Notre Dame (Mr. Ruskin here handed round some beautiful calotype views of the sculptured arches and columns of the French and English cathedrals of the thirteenth century, evidencing the superiority of the former in point of refinement). The fact,

Charlemagne never succeeded in learning to write, though he was constantly trying. Ruskin was referred to “Eginhart, p. 140, ed. Frankf. 1707. Hallam’s Middle Ages, ii. 352, 9th ed., and Milman’s Gibbon, ix. 178. Sismondi, Hist. des Francais, i. 423, ed. (I am sorry to say) Bruxelles, 1847.” (2) Secondly, as appears in the text, Freeman objected that it was Alfred’s own mother who taught him to read: “Pauli’s Life of Alfred, p. 86 (Eng. ed.), or Mr. Thorpe’s Note on Florence, i. 86.” This was criticised as a mistake by intention. “Mr. Ruskin’s motive is obvious, being of a piece with the anti-national character of his writings in general ... Mr. Ruskin is said to know something about modern painters; he evidently knows as little of mediæval kings as of English architecture.”]

¹ [See above, p. 476.]

² [See above, p. 92.]

³ [For Cockerell, see Vol. IX. p. 430 n.]

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