lxviii INTRODUCTION

The Duke, it will be seen, had kept his best books for the last. Ruskin in his diary noted some of the most beautiful of them, and made drawings from them. How highly he valued the collection was to appear thirty years later when the manuscripts came into the market. He then issued an appeal for funds in the hope of securing some of them for public collections;¹ but the story of that effort belongs to a later volume. On returning to London, Ruskin entered at the British Museum upon a systematic study of the illuminated manuscripts in that opulent collection; on his visits to the Museum (1853-1854) he was often accompanied by Millais. Page after page in his diaries contains notes upon the MSS. The notes are hardly intelligible or significant to any one else, but it is at any rate possible, and it is interesting, to follow his method of study. He went all through the collection, nothing dates and styles. Then he threw them into groups, according to subjects or styles or arrangements of colours. He made careful notes on the manuscripts in his own possession, indexing their initial letters and subjects. The studies thus indicated in his diaries were often utilised for incidental illustration in his books, but he never published anything dealing exclusively with the subject. The report of these Lectures of 1854, though not complete, is for this reason of special interest.

The intense delight which Ruskin experienced in these “fairy cathedrals,” as he called them, “full of painted windows,”² was attended, however, by some qualms of conscience. The artistic and the moral sides of his nature were then as often at strife, and it was only gradually that a reconciliation was reached. The mood is seen very clearly in some letters to his father:-

“Sunday, 23rd [October, 1853].-...My love of art has been a terrible temptation to me, and I feel that I have been sadly self-indulgent lately-what with casts, Liber Studiorum, missals, and Tintorets. I think I must cut the whole passion short off at the root, or I shall get to be a mere collector, like old Mr. Wells of Redleaf,³ or Sir W. Scott, or worst of all Beckford or Horace Walpole. I am sure I ought to take that text to heart, “covetousness which is idolatry,” for I do idolize my Turners and missals, and I can’t conceive anybody being ever tried with a heavier temptation than I

¹ See General Statement Explaining the Nature of and Purpose of St. George’s Guild, dated February 21, 1882.

² Præterita, iii. ch. i. § 19.

³ Mr. Wells, of Redleaf, Penshurst, for many years a sea-captain in the East India Company’s service, formed a large collection of modern works of art. Notices of him may be found in many books of artists’ reminiscences; see, e.g., Frith’s Autobiography, i. 319, and J. C. Horsley’s Recollections of a Royal Academician, p. 55.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]