208 PRÆTERITA-I

developed; and had he not, as time went on, been bound to the routine of professional work, and satisfied in the serenity, not to say arrested by the interests, of a beautiful home life,--it is no use thinking or saying what he might have been; those who know him best are the most thankful that he is what he is.

234. Next to Acland, but with a many-feet-thick wall between, in my æsthetic choice of idols, which required primarily of man or woman that they should be comely, before I regarded any of their farther qualities, came Francis Charteris.¹ I have always held Charteris the most ideal Scotsman, and on the whole the grandest type of European Circassian race hitherto visible to me; and his subtle, effortless, inevitable, unmalicious sarcasm, and generally sufficient and available sense, gave a constantly natural, and therefore inoffensive, hauteur to his delicate beauty. He could do what he liked with any one,-at least with any one of good humour and sympathy; and when one day, the old sub-dean coming out of Canterbury gate at the instant Charteris was dismounting at it in forbidden pink, and Charteris turned serenely to him, as he took his foot out of the stirrup, to inform him that “he had been out with the Dean’s hounds,” the old man and the boy were both alike pleased.

Charteris never failed in anything, but never troubled himself about anything. Naturally of high ability and activity, he did all he chose with ease,-neither had falls in hunting, nor toil in reading, nor ambition nor anxiety in examination,-nor disgrace in recklessness of life. He was partly checked, it may be in some measure weakened, by hectic danger in his constitution, possibly the real cause of his never having made his mark in after life.

235. The Earl of Desart,² next to Charteris, interested me most of the men at my table. A youth of the same

¹ [The ninth Earl of Wemyss, born a year before Ruskin (1818) and still hale and hearty (1908). See above, p. 192.]

² [See, again, above, p. 192.]

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