224 PRÆTERITA-I

it, plank its blaeberries over with a platform, and drive the populace headlong past it as fast as they can scuffle.¹

It had been well for me if I had climbed Ben Venue and Ben Ledi, hammer in hand, as Scawfell and Helvellyn. But I had given myself some literary work instead, to which I was farther urged by the sight of Roslyn and Melrose.

250. The idea had come into my head in the summer of ’37, and, I imagine, rose immediately out of my sense of the contrast between the cottages of Westmoreland and those of Italy. Anyhow, the November number of Loudon’s Architectural Magazine for 1837 opens with “Introduction to the Poetry of Architecture; or, The Architecture of the Nations of Europe considered in its Association with Natural Scenery and National Character,” by Kataphusin.² I could not have put in fewer, or more inclusive words, the definition of what half my future life was to be spent in discoursing of; while the nom-de-plume I chose, “According to Nature,” was equally expressive of the temper in which I was to discourse alike on that and every other subject. The adoption of a nom-de-plume at all, implied (as also the concealment of name on the first publication of Modern Painters) a sense of a power of judgment in myself, which it would not have been becoming in a youth of eighteen to claim. Had either my father or tutor then said to me, “Write as it is becoming in a youth to write,- let the reader discover what you know, and be persuaded to what you judge,” I perhaps might not now have been ashamed of my youth’s essays. Had they said to me more sternly, “Hold your tongue till you need not ask the reader’s condescension in listening to you,” I might perhaps have been satisfied with my work when it was mature.

¹ [The MS. here reads:-

“If only I had had the sense to say to papa and mama-the thought did vaguely come into my chrysalid head-‘Leave me here in a shepherd’s bothie, where I can have peat fire and truckle bed and porridge and milk, and let me learn these hills instead of any more Greek this summer’ -Parcis, not Dis, aliter visum.”

For the reference to the Æneid, see Vol. XIV. p. 351; compare, below, p. 626.]

² [See now Vol. I. pp. 1-188.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]