VIII. THE STATE OF DENMARK 391

changed, on my own seal, the “Age quod agis” into “To-day,” tacitly underlined to myself with the warning, “The night cometh, when no man can work.”¹

161. But as years went on, and the belief in fortune, and fortune-telling, which is finally confessed in “Fors Clavigera,” asserted itself more distinctly in my private philosophy, I began to be much exercised in mind as to the fortunate, or otherwise, meaning of my father’s choosing a pig for my crest; and that the more, because I could not decide whether it was lawful for me to adopt the Greek mode of interpretation, according to which I might consider myself an assistant of Hercules in the conquest of the Erymanthian boar, or was restricted to the Gothic reading which would compel me to consider myself a pig in personâ,-(as the aforesaid Marmion a falcon, or Albert of Geierstein a vulture,²)-and only take pride in the strength of bristle, and curl of tusk, which occasioned, in my days of serious critical influence, the lament of the Academician in Punch:

“I paints and paints,

Hears no complaints,

And sells before I’m dry,

Till savage Ruskin

Sticks his tusk in,

And nobody will buy.”³

Inclining, as time went on, more and more to this view of the matter, I rested at last in the conviction that my prototype and patron saint was indeed, not Hercules, but St. Anthony of Padua, and that it might in a measure be recorded also of little me, that

“il se retira d’abord dans une solitude peu éloignée du bourg de Côme, puis dans un sépulcre fort éloigné de ce bourg, enfin dans les masures d’un vieux château au-dessus d’Héraclée, où il vécut pendant vingt ans. Il n’est

¹ [Luke ix. 4.]

² [See Anne of Geierstein, chap. v.]

³ [“Poem by a Perfectly Furious Academician.” In Punch, 1856; reprinted at p. 70 of Wit and Humour, by Shirley Brooks, 1875. Ruskin’s citation is not quite correct: see Vol. XIV. p. xxvii.]

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