II. MONT VELAN 499

Necessitas”¹-she, Delilah, and Judith, all the three of them; only we haven’t any record of Delilah’s hymn when she first fastened Samson’s hair to the beam:² and of Judith, nobody says any harm;-I suppose because she gave Holofernes wine, instead of milk and butter. It was Byron, however, not Deborah, who made me understand the thing; the passage he paraphrased from her, in the Giaour, having rung in my ears ever since I wrote the Scythian Banquet-song³-

“The browsing camels’ bells are tinkling,

His mother looked from her lattice high,” etc.

And I felt now that I had myself driven nails enough into my mother’s heart, if not into my father’s coffin; and would thankfully have taken her home a shawl of divers colours on both sides, and a pretty damsel or two,⁴ in imitation of Sisera: but she always liked to choose her damsels for herself.

It was lucky, in her last choosing, she chanced on Joan Agnew; but we are a far way yet from Joanie’s time, I don’t quite know how far.⁵ Turner died, as I said, in 1851: Prout had left us still earlier;⁶ there could be no more sharing of festivities on my birthday with him. He went home to De-Crespigny Terrace from Denmark Hill one evening, seeming perfectly well and happy;-and we saw him no more.

26. And my dog Wisie, was he dead too? It seems wholly wonderful to me at this moment that he should ever have died. He was a white Spitz, exactly like Carpaccio’s dog in the picture of St. Jerome;⁷ and he came

¹ [“Sæva Necessitas,” it should be, the reference being to Horace, Odes, i. 35, 17-the passage which first suggested to Ruskin the title Fors Clavigera: see Vol. XXVII. p. xix.]

² [Judges xvi. 14. For the next reference, see Judith xii., where, however, it is not stated that she gave the wine to Holofernes.]

³ [See Vol. II. p. 57.]

⁴ [See Judges v. 30.]

⁵ [See ch. iv.; below, p. 537.]

⁶ [He died, however, in 1852.]

⁷ [See the engraving, from Ruskin’s drawing of the dog in this picture, in Vol. XXIV. p. 230.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]