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has been fitting me to take greater fortune more prudently, and do better work more thoroughly. And just when I seem to be coming out of school-very sorry to have been such a foolish boy, yet having taken a prize or two, and expecting to enter now upon some more serious business than cricket,-I am dismissed by the Master I hoped to serve, with a-“That’s all I want of you, sir.”

209. I imagine the sorrowfulness of these feelings must be abated, in the minds of most men, by a pleasant vanity in their hope of being remembered as the discoverers, at least, of some important truth, or the founders of some exclusive system called after their own names. But I have never applied myself to discover anything, being content to praise what had already been discovered; and the only doctrine or system peculiar to me is the abhorrence of all that is doctrinal instead of demonstrable, and of all that is systematic instead of useful: so that no true disciple of mine will ever be a “Ruskinian”!-he will follow, not me, but the instincts of his own soul, and the guidance of its Creator.¹ Which, though not a sorrowful subject of contemplation in itself, leaves me none of the common props and crutches of halting pride. I know myself to be a true master, because my pupils are well on the way to do better than I have done; but there is not always a sense of extreme pleasure in watching their advance, where one has no more strength, though more than ever the will, to companion them.

210. Not always-be it again confessed; but when I first read the legend of St. George, which here follows, my eyes grew wet with tears of true delight; first, in the knowledge of so many beautiful things, at once given to me; and then in the surety of the wide good that the work thus begun would spring up into, in ways before wholly unconceived by me. It was like coming to the brow of some healthy moorland, where here and there one had watched, or helped, the

¹ [Compare Vol. XXII. p. 505.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]