INTRODUCTION XXV

them all lawyers and physicians? It is much easier to write out deeds, and raise difficulties about them-and to make pills, and prescribe them-than to govern a country.

“Effie’s best regards,

“Ever affectionately yours,

“J. RUSKIN.”¹

Ruskin’s diary is also full of Millais’s picture:-

“GLENFINLAS, July 20, 1853.-Yesterday drawing on the rocks by the stream; Everett ill with headache. The skies all turquoise and violet, and melted in dew, and heavenly bars of delicate cloud behind Ben Venue in evening.

“Millais’s picture of Glenfinlas was begun on Wednesday; outlined at once, Henry Acland holding the canvas, and a piece laid in that afternoon. None done on Thursday-about an hour’s work on Friday.”

Then Ruskin keeps a sort of time-table of the number of hours’ work put into the picture each week-in the first week, four days of from 11 or 12 to 5 or 6; next week, three days 11-5, two 4-7; third week, four days 1-5; one 4-7; fourth week, three days 12-6; fifth week, three days, “a good forenoon”; sixth week, a “good three hours,” on four days; seventh week, “good days, about three hours each”; eighth week, only two “good days”; ninth, three “good forenoons”; on two other days, an hour each; the tenth and last week recorded showed three “excellent days.” The portrait was not completed till the following winter, for on January 12 and 19, 1854, there are entries in Ruskin’s diary of sittings to Millais.

During the progress of the work in Scotland Ruskin sometimes very literally stood over Millais, and an entry in the diary shows us what thoughts we may read in his eyes as he stands contemplatively in the picture:-

“August 2.-Out with Millais at six, holding the umbrella over him as he worked, and watching the stream, looking down it, due south; the sun of course on my left. It is curious how unconscious the eye is of colour, under any circumstances which render the forms to which it belongs altogether vague. Thus if we stand by a Highland stream in sunlight, we shall probably at first be struck merely by its marked gradations of one colour, from the pale golden where it glides in shallow ripples over the white pebbles, deepening

¹ This is Letter V. in a volume (privately printed in 1897) of Letters from John Ruskin to Frederick J. Furnivall, edited by T. J. Wise. The word “sloping” is there (p. 16) misprinted “slipping.”

[Version 0.04: March 2008]