lviii INTRODUCTION

passages because Ruskin, forgetting that they had been omitted, refers to them in his text (e.g., pp. 81, 87, 157, 224, 244); (ii.) one long passage, which was obviously intended for a continuation of the book and which carries on the story of his life, is given as an appendix to vol. iii. ch. iii. (pp. 532-534). (iii.) Other passages, which are long and do not conveniently fit on to any one particular place in the text, are printed in the Appendix to the volume, arranged under various heads (pp. 607-627).

The Appendix contains, lastly (pp. 632-635)-printed from the MS. material-Ruskin’s scheme for the completion of Præterita and continuation of Dilecta, a scheme frustrated by the final breakdown of his health. Passages then follow (pp. 635-642) which were to have been issued, had he been able to carry out his scheme.

III

Præterita, as has been said, is fragmentary. It may be well, therefore, to go over the ground covered by the book, and add some particulars of interest.

Of Ruskin’s ancestry, he gives account at pp. 19, 62 on his father’s side, and on pp. 18, 122 on his mother’s. He regrets, however, that he did not, while his parents yet lived, learn more about his forebears (p. 122). In Dilecta (p. 593) Mrs. Arthur Severn’s uncle, Mr. John Ruskin Tweddale, traced the genealogy back for some generations through Catherine Tweddale, Ruskin’s paternal grandmother. A family tree based on these researches is given on p. 603. It is of interest to know that she was the daughter of the parish minister of Glenluce, and that Ruskin was thus (in the third generation) “a son of the Manse.”¹ Subsequent researches have carried the history further back on the side of Ruskin’s grandfather.

This grandfather, John Thomas Ruskin (1761-1817?), made a runaway match, as Ruskin relates in Præterita (p. 62), with Catherine Tweddale. She was sixteen at the time, and Ruskin sketches her character as that of a bright and animated girl, of a robust cheerfulness which no trials could subdue. Her husband was established in 1786 as a grocer, and the Edinburgh Directory gives his address as “head of Kennedy’s Close,” in the old town near the Tron Church. He must have prospered in his business, for in 1800 he had moved to 15 St.

¹ He refers to this ancestry in The Lord’s Prayer and the Church: Vol. XXXIV. p. 227; see also an additional passage now printed in the Appendix (below, p. 607).

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