VIII. THE STATE OF DENMARK 385

companions, Charles Newton. He was considerably my senior, besides being a rightly bred scholar, who knew his grammar and his quantities; and, while yet an undergraduate, was doing accurately useful work in the Architectural Society. Without rudely depreciating my Proutesque manner of drawing, he represented to me that it did not meet all the antiquarian purposes of that body; and, always under protest, I drew a Norman door for Newton, (as the granite veins of Trewavas Head for Dr. Buckland,¹) with distinct endeavour to give the substantial facts in each, apparent to the vulgar mind. And if only-once more pardon, good reader, but this is really an “if” that I cannot resist-if only Newton had learnt Irish instead of Greek, Scotch instead of Egyptian, and preferred, for light reading, the study of the Venerable Bede to that of Victor Hugo,-well, the British Museum might have been still habitable; the effigy, as the bones, of Mausolus would have rested in peace;² and the British public known more than any Idylls of kings have yet told them, of personages such as Arthur, Alfred, and Charlemagne.

156. There remained yet some possibilities, even after Charles Newton became Attic and diplomatic, of some heroic attachment between us, in the manner of Theseus and Pirithous. In fact, for some years after my Camberwell window and Campo Santo entanglements, Theseus retained, I believe, some hope of delivering me from those Lethean chains; nor until so late as the year 1850,³ when, as we crossed the Great St. Bernard together, Charles spoke heresies against the Valley of Chamouni, remarking, with respect to its glacial moraines, that “he thought more

¹ [See above, i. § 225 (p. 198). For another reference to Ruskin drawing for Newton, see the Appendix; below, p. 611.]

² [For Ruskin’s dislike of the statue of Mausolus, discovered by Newton at Halicarnassus, see a letter to Malleson of April 23, 1881 (Vol. XXXVII.).]

³ [Really in August 1851: see Vol. X. p. xxiv., where some account of Newton’s journey with Ruskin to the Great St. Bernard, Chamouni, the Val d’Aosta (castle of Verres), and Milan is given. Newton had just been appointed by Lord Granville to the vice-consulship of Mytilene; but he did not go to the Levant till February 1852 (see his Travels and Discoveries in the Levant).]

XXXV. 2B

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