VIII. VESTER, CAMENAE 151

enough and to spare, I had learnt from Scott-but his Lady of the Lake was as openly fictitious as his White Maid of Avenel:¹ while Rogers was a mere dilettante, who felt no difference between landing “where Tell leaped ashore,” or standing where “St. Preux has stood.”² Even Shakespeare’s Venice was visionary; and Portia as impossible as Miranda. But Byron told me of, and reanimated for me, the real people whose feet had worn the marble I trod on.³

175. One word only, though it trenches on a future subject,⁴ I must permit myself about his rhythm. Its natural flow in almost prosaic simplicity and tranquillity interested me extremely, in opposition alike to the symmetrical clauses of Pope’s logical metre, and to the balanced strophes of classic and Hebrew verse. But though I followed his manner instantly in what verses I wrote for my own amusement, my respect for the structural, as opposed to fluent, force of the classic measures, supported as it was partly by Byron’s contempt for his own work, and partly by my own architect’s instinct for “the principle of the pyramid,” made me long endeavour, in forming my prose style, to keep the cadences of Pope and Johnson for all serious statement. Of Johnson’s influence on me I have to give account in the last chapter of this volume;⁵ meantime, I must get back to the days of mere rivuletsinging, in my poor little watercress life.

176. I had a sharp attack of pleurisy in the spring of ‘35, which gave me much gasping pain, and put me in some danger for three or four days, during which our old family physician, Dr. Walshman, and my mother, defended me against the wish of all other scientific people to have

¹ [Compare Fors Clavigera, Letter 92 (Vol. XXIX. p. 458).]

² [See the section headed “Meillerie”-on the Lake of Geneva, celebrated by Byron (note to Childe Harold, iii. 99) and by Rousseau (who in the Nouvelle Héloïse lands St. Preux and Mme. Wolmar there)-in Rogers’s Italy.]

³ [Yet with some falsity of sentiment, as Ruskin notes in The Stones of Venice: see Vol. X. p. 8, and Vol. XI. pp. 232-233.]

⁴ [On Ruskin’s “rhythmic ear,” see below, p. 177.]

⁵ [See p. 225.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]