140 PRÆTERITA-I

gradually accustomed to be together, and far on into life were glad when any chance brought us together again.

162. The year 1834 passed innocuously enough, but with little profit, in the quadripartite industries before described,¹ followed for my own pleasure;-with minglings of sapless effort in the classics, in which I neither felt, nor foresaw, the least good.

Innocuously enough, I say,-meaning, with as little mischief as a well-intentioned boy, virtually masterless, could suffer from having all his own way, and daily confirming himself in the serious impression that his own way was always the best.

I cannot analyse, at least without taking more trouble than I suppose any reader would care to take with me, the mixed good and evil in the third-rate literature which I preferred to the Latin classics. My volume of the Forget-me-not, which gave me that precious engraving of Verona,² (curiously also another by Prout of St. Mark’s at Venice,) was somewhat above the general caste of annuals in its quality of letterpress; and contained three stories, “The Red-nosed Lieutenant,” by the Rev. George Croly;³ “Hans in Kelder,” by the author of “Chronicles of London Bridge”;⁴ and “The Comet,” by Henry Neele, Esq.,⁵ which

¹ [See above, p. 120. In (1) rhyme, he wrote during this year “The Crystal-Hunter” (Vol. II. p. 388); in (2) drawing, he continued the illustrations to his “Tour on the Continent”; in (3) architecture, he was presumably copying Prout; whilst (4) in science, he wrote on “Mont Blanc and Twisted Strata” (Vol. I. p. 194).]

² [See above, § 102 (p. 91). The “Monument at Verona,” engraved by E. Finden after Samuel Prout, is at p. 207 of Forget-me-not; a Christmas and New Year’s Present for MDCCCXXVII., edited by Frederic Shoberl (London: Published by R. Ackermann). The St. Mark’s (engraved by Freebairn) is at p. 359. “The Red-nosed Lieutenant” has no author’s name attached to it.]

³ [For whom, see Vol. XXXIV. p. 95. In a letter to W. H. Harrison, written in 1843, Ruskin says:-

“I am reading Salathiel. It is too fragmentary-bits of broken glass with the sun on them-too uniformly fine, too ceaselessly scenic, feverish. I don’t read it with pleasure. The doctor’s philosophy is not well based; there is dust at the foundation, and tinsel on the top.”

See also the letter to W.H. Harrison of November 1845 (Vol. XXXVI.).]

⁴ [Chronicles of Old London Bridge, an illustrated work published anonymously by Messrs. Smith & Elder.]

⁵ [Henry Neele (1798-1828), poet and miscellaneous writer.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]