I. OF AGE 245

autobiography chiefly by giving accounts of the people he has met, I find it only possible, within my planned limits, to take note of those who have had distinct power in the training or the pruning of little me to any good.

4. I return first to my true master in mathematics, poor Mr. Rowbotham.¹ Of course he missed his Herne Hill evenings sadly when I went to Oxford. But always, when we came home, it was understood that once in the fortnight, or so, as he felt himself able, he should still toil up the hill to tea. We were always sorry to see him at the gate; but felt that it was our clear small duty to put up with his sighing for an hour or two in such rest as his woful life could find. Nor were we without some real affection for him. His face had a certain grandeur, from its constancy of patience, bewildered innocence, and firm lines of faculty in geometric sort. Also he brought us news from the mathematical and grammatical world, and told us some interesting details of manufacture, if he had been on a visit to his friend Mr. Crawshay.² His own home became yearly more wretched, till one day its little ten-years-old Peepy choked himself with his teetotum. The

the meaning of the total want of any sense of what we now call sublimity, either in scenery or circumstance, which at this period characterises alike the art, literature, and life of civilized Europe.... Concerning which the point which I have to note is that ‘gentry,’ living in chateaux and seats, taking their pleasure in gardens and parks, wearing wigs and hoops, and reading the Roman Catholic literature corresponding, were necessarily incapable of receiving any idea of ‘the sublime’ from nature or art; that a rock could be nothing but a nuisance to them, a fountain nothing till it was taught its fountain manège, a tree nothing till it was taught to stand with others in an avenue, and their own valour and beauty nothing till its shoes are tied and its cheeks painted. This the reader of any sagacity may see for himself. What he will neither at once see, nor at all on the first hearing believe, is that the sense of sublimity and beauty in nature is correlative with the Justice and Charity of the human heart; that the Heavens are sublime when we believe there is a God of Justice to rule them or to rend; that the Rocks are sublime when we believe that their foundations are laid by God’s plummet and their crests bowed by His will; and that the Seas and Rivers are sublime when we know that their Master has bound them with their beaches, or by their living waters led forth His flocks.”

To Evelyn’s Sylva, Ruskin refers below, p. 557. ]

¹ [See i. § 93; above, p. 83.]

² [William Crawshay, ironmaster (1788-1867); father of R. T. Crawshay mentioned in Fors Clavigera, Letters 85 and 86 (Vol. XXIX. pp. 328, 353).]

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