X. CROSSMOUNT 415

press of speed; their bits of sails worn and patched like those of an old fishing-boat. Here, for modest specimen of my then proper art style, I give my careful drawing of the loose lashed jib of one of them, as late as 1854.* The immeasurable delight to me of being able to loiter and swing about just over the bowsprit and watch the plunge of the bows, if there was the least swell or broken sea to lift them, with the hope of Calais at breakfast, and the horses’ heads set straight for Mont Blanc to-morrow, is one of the few pleasures I look back to as quite unmixed. In getting a Turner drawing I always wanted another; but I didn’t want to be in more boats than one at once.

As I had done my second volume greatly to my father’s and mother’s delight, (they used both to cry a little, at least my father generally did, over the pretty passages, when I read them after breakfast,) it had been agreed that they should both go with me that summer to see all the things and pictures spoken off,-Ilaria, and the Campo Santo, and St. Mary’s of the Thorn, and the School of St. Roch.

Though tired, I was in excellent health, and proud hope; they also at their best and gladdest. And we had a happy walk up and down the quiet streets of Calais that day, before four o’clock dinner.

186. I have dwelt with insistence in last chapter¹ on my preference of the Hotel de Ville at Calais to the Alcazar of Seville. Not that I was without love of grandeur in buildings; but, in that kind, Rouen front and Beauvais apse

* In which year we must have started impatiently, without our rubrical gooseberry pie,² for I find the drawing is dated “10th May, my father’s birthday,” and thus elucidated, “Opposite,” (i.e., on leaf of diary,) “the jib of steamer seen from inside it on the deck. The double curve at the base of it is curious; in reality the curves were a good deal broken, the sail being warped like a piece of wetted paper. The rings by which it holds, being alternately round and edge to the eye, are curious. The lines are of course seams, which go to the bottom of the sail; the brown marks, running short the same way, are stains.”

¹ [See above, p. 402.]

² [See above, i. § 33 (p. 32).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]