416 ST. MARK’S, VENICE

not, be time to obtain perfect record of all that is to be destroyed. I have entirely honest and able draughtsmen at my command; my own resignation¹ of my Oxford Professorship has given me leisure; and all that I want from the antiquarian sympathy of England is so much instant help as may permit me, while yet in available vigour of body and mind, to get the records made under my own overseership, and registered for sufficient and true. The casts and drawings which I mean to have made will be preserved in a consistent series in my Museum at Sheffield, where I have freehold ground enough to build a perfectly lighted gallery for their reception. I have used the words “I want,” as if praying this thing for myself. It is not so. If only some other person could and would undertake all this, Heaven knows how gladly I would leave the task to him. But there is no one else at present able to do it: if not now by me, it can never be done more. And so I leave it to the reader’s grace.

J. RUSKIN.

All subscriptions to be sent to Mr. G. ALLEN, Sunny-side, Orpington, Kent.

POSTSCRIPT²

6. By the kindness of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours I am permitted this year, in view of the crisis of the fate of the façade of St. Mark’s, to place in the Exhibition Room of the Society ten photographs, illustrative of its past and present state. I have already made use of them, both in my lectures at Oxford and in the parts of Fors Clavigera intended for Art-teaching at my Sheffield Museum; and all but the eight are obtainable from my assistant, Mr. Ward (2, Church Terrace, Richmond),³ who

¹ [Early in 1879.]

² [Not in the first edition.]

³ [For references to some of them in Fors Clavigera, see Letter 78. The use of the photographs in his Oxford lectures must have been in the unpublished lectures of 1877.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]