I. THE GRANDE CHARTREUSE 485

more Swiss towns to my list, namely, Rheinfelden and Bellinzona,¹ in illustration of Turner’s sketches at those places; and get reluctant leave from my father to take Couttet again, and have all my own way. I spend the spring at Rheinfelden, and the summer at Bellinzona. But Couttet being of opinion that these town views will come to no good, and that the time I spend on the roof of “cette baraque” at Bellinzona is wholly wasted, I give the town views all up, and take to Vandyke and Paul Veronese again in the gallery of Turin. But, on returning home, my father is not satisfied with my studies from those masters, and piteously asks for the end of Modern Painters, saying “he will be dead before it is done.” Much ashamed of myself, I promise him to do my best on it with farther subterfuge.

1859. Hard writing and drawing to that end. Fourth volume got done.² My father thinks, himself, I ought to see Berlin, Dresden, Munich, and Nuremberg, before the book is finished. He and my mother take their last continental journey with me to those places. I have my last happy walk with my father at Königstein.

1860. I work hard all the winter and early spring- finish the book, in a sort; my father well pleased with the last chapter, and the engraved drawings from Nuremberg and Rheinfelden. On the strength of this piece of filial duty, I am cruel enough to go away to St. Martin’s again, by myself, to meditate on what is to be done next. Thence I go up to Chamouni,-where a new epoch of life and death begins.³

13. And here I must trace, as simply and rapidly as

¹ [For Rheinfelden, see Plates 82 and 83 in Modern Painters, vol. v. (Vol. VII. p. 436); and for Bellinzona, Plate C (ibid., p. xxxvi.).]

² [Here Ruskin’s memory is at fault. The fourth volume was finished and issued immediately after the third, early in 1856.]

³ [Of life, as explained in the passage now added from the MS., below, p. 533; of death, because the new hopes, there referred to, were doomed to disappointment. And, more generally, “a new epoch of life and death” because Ruskin was now, in large measure, to turn from the study of art and nature to social economics, and because the period in question was one of religious doubt and despondency: see Vol. XVII. pp. xxxviii.-xlii.]

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