INTRODUCTION lix

James Square, and in 1805 he appears as “agent.”¹ Ruskin’s father in a letter to Miss Mitford (January 5, 1852) thus describes the author’s grandfather and grandmother: “I had also a father more magnificent in his expenditure than mindful of his family; so indiscriminate and boundless in his hospitalities that, when the invited guests arrived, he would sometimes have to inquire their names. My mother, too, had a heart large enough to embrace the whole human race, but with universal love combined peculiar prudence.”² John Thomas and his wife moved in the end in a cultivated society, being on friendly terms, for instance, with the renowned Professor Thomas Brown (p. 123).

John Thomas Ruskin was the son of John Ruskin (1732-1780), of whom little is known; but a writer in the Celtic Review³ traces the family back conjecturally to Muckairn, which lies along the shore of Loch Etive. A family of the MacCalmans of Barraglas had, it seems, a tanning-house, immediately below the present railway station of Tigh-an-uillt. They had to bark trees for tanning, and were known as “na Rusgain” (“the peelers”) and Clann Rusgain (“the bark-peeling family”), thus losing their clan name in an occupation name. This native industry was killed about 1750. One of the Muckairn Rusgains joined the Earl of Mar in 1715, and was severely wounded at the battle of Sheriffmuir. “His comrades carried him from the field to a farmhouse, where, being a young man of good presence, ability, and manners, he was hospitably entertained and nursed. And if every person was good to him, the daughter of the house was specially so. She was watching him by day and night till she brought him home from death. Then MacRuskin from Muckairn and the daughter of the farmer in the sheriffdom of Perth were married,” and from him, it is suggested that John Ruskin was descended-a genealogy in which Ruskin, when informed of it, we are told, was “intensely interested.”

Whether it is true is, however, another matter. For among Ruskin’s papers is the indenture of the apprenticeship of “John Thomas Ruskin,⁴

¹ See chapter xii. (“John Ruskin’s Grandfather, a Merchant at the West of the Tron Kirk”) in The Tron Kirk of Edinburgh, or Christ’s Kirk at the Tron, a History, by the Rev. D. Butler, Edinburgh, 1906.

² W. G. Collingwood’s Life and Work of John Ruskin, 1900, p. 7 n.

³ “The Ruskins,” by Alexander Carmichael, in the Celtic Review, April 1906, vol. ii. pp. 343-351. Dr. Cameron Gillies in his Place-Names of Argyll, 1906, pp. 246, 247, accepts Mr. Carmichael’s theory, and incidentally relates the tradition that the Rusgains were sculptors of Celtic stones. See also an article, “The Scottish Ancestors of Ruskin,” by William Sinclair, in St. George, vol. ix. p. 238.

⁴ “John Thomas Ruskin was alive in the early part of 1817, as in a letter addressed to his mother, Catherine Tweddale, at Bowerswell, Perth, dated April 1 in that year, John James Ruskin sends a message to his father. The year of his death and place of burial have not been ascertained. His health had failed in 1815.” See a letter by Mr. Wedderburn in the Scottish Review, March 21, 1904. There

[Version 0.04: March 2008]