384 PRÆTERITA-II

might assuredly have been led by Edmund Oldfield into a study of all the painted glass in England, if only Edmund had been a little more happy in his own power: but I suppose his immediate success was too easy to divert him from the courses of study which afterwards gave him his high position in the British Museum,¹ not enough recognized by the public, and, I believe, farther obscured by the ill humour or temper of Mr. Panizzi.² If only-I may still sometimes indulge in a “might have been,”³ for my friends-he had kept to Gothic foils and their glass, my belief is that Edmund Oldfield could have done for England great part of what Viollet-le-Duc did for France, with the same earnestness, and with thrice the sensibility. But the sensibility taking in him the form of reserve, and the restless French energy being absent, he diffused himself in serene scholarship till too late, and retired from the collisions and intrigues of the Museum too early.

Our temporary alliance among the traceries of Camber-well had for immediate consequence to me, an introduction to his family, which broke the monastic laws of Denmark Hill to the extent of tempting me to a Christmas revel or two with his pretty sisters; whereat I failed in my part in every game, and whence I retired in a sackcloth of humiliation, of which the tissue had at once the weight of a wet blanket, and the sting of horsehair.

155. I have only once named⁴ among my Christ Church

¹ [Edmund Oldfield (1817-1902), M.A., F.S.A., Honorary Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford; assistant keeper of the antiquities at the British Museum; and at one time private secretary to Sir Henry Austen Layard at the Office of Works. (For an obituary notice, see the Times, April 15, 1902.)]

² [Sir Anthony Panizzi (1797-1879), keeper of the printed books at the British Museum, 1837; principal librarian, 1856-1866.]

³ [See above, p. 378.]

⁴ [See above, i. § 225 (p. 198). Newton was Ruskin’s senior by three years (1816-1894); he was appointed an assistant in the British Museum, 1840; in the consular service in the East, 1852-1860, during which time he identified the site, and secured for the Museum the chief remains, of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus; keeper of the Greek and Roman antiquities, 1861-1885; K. C. B., 1877. In a letter to W. H. Harrison (circ. 1850) Ruskin writes:-

“Newton is indeed a noble fellow. I learn more from him than from any other of my acquaintance, old and young, besides getting prime jokes into the bargain.”]

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