INTRODUCTION lvii

said Ruskin, “to be in any avoidable way disagreeable or querulous.”¹ He also succeeded for the most part in keeping it free from the desultoriness which too often marked his later books. The tone in which Præterita is written is as if he had resolved in this last work of his pen to atone for past petulance by sustained gentleness, and “it affords beautiful and final testimony to the real sweetness of his nature.”²

It may be interesting to describe, in connexion with an account of the manuscripts, how Præterita was written. The manuscript of Præterita is at Brantwood. It consists of:-

(i.) A few sheets of the MS. of Fors Clavigera in which Ruskin began his autobiography. An unpublished passage written for Fors is now given in the Appendix “Galloway Ancestry” (p. 607).

(ii.) Three small books used as diaries from January 1 to July 14, 1885. In these, after a brief entry of diary, Ruskin wrote, with hardly any corrections, each day a bit of Præterita. Some of the unpublished passages in these books are added in the present edition. Of the hitherto published text of Præterita, these Diaries contain (in different order) the greater part of vol. i. and most of vol. ii. §§ 7-70, with several passages which were ultimately placed later. For he printed his MS. in an order very different from that in which it was written. In the Diaries, he wrote down from day to day pieces of reminiscence as they occurred to him. The material thus compiled was put into shape in the next two stages:-

(iii.) A fair copy by Ruskin of most of the first, and much of the second of the three diaries, with some additions; and, lastly,

(iv.) The main mass of the MS. of the book as printed, written in Ruskin’s hand on his usual lined foolscap.

Two facsimiles of pages of the MS. in this final form are given at pp. 326-327 and 562-563. The latter is of special interest as being the last page which Ruskin wrote for the press.

In his re-arrangement of the material, Ruskin omitted many interesting passages, either because they would not conveniently fit in, or because he meant to use them in the intended continuation of Præterita or Dilecta. Several of these additional passages are printed in the present volume-in three different ways:-(i.) where the passages are short and directly supplement a particular passage in the original text, they are printed as footnotes (e.g., pp. 97, 108, 112, 116, 155, 197, 204, 219, 233, 253, 254, 255, 258, 261, 272, 287, 293, 302, 308, 371, 417, 418, 465); it is sometimes the more desirable to have such additional

¹ See i. § 58 (p. 49).

² “Ruskin’s Views of Literature,” by R. Warwick Bond, in the Contemporary Review, June 1905, p. 856.

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