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shall get my first dividend this January; and, whenever I can get leave from the police and inhabitants, I will keep my three sweepers steadily at work for eight hours a day; and I hope soon to show you a bit of our London streets kept as clean as the deck of a ship of the line.'

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,

JOHN RUSKIN.

December 27, 1871.

IV.-EDUCATION FOR RICH AND POOR.

[From "The Pall Mall Gazette," January 31, 1868.]

TRUE EDUCATION.2

To the Editor of "The Pall Mall Gazette."

SIR: The letter you published yesterday from a parish schoolboy of "Sixty Years Since" at Weary-faulds (confirmed as it would be doubtless in all practical respects by testimony of English boys educated at Waverley Honour) has my hearty sympathy; but I am wearier than any tenant of Weary-faulds of seeing this subject of education always treated as if "education "only meant teaching children to write or to cipher or to

1 Mr. Ruskin was as good as his word, and his sweepers were at work in the following January.

2 The Pall Mall Gazette of January 27 contained a leader on "Compulsory Education," and that of January 29 one upon a speech of the Bishop of Oxford on the same subject, made at a meeting in connection with the National Society, held at Tunbridge Wells on the preceding day. In the Gazette of January 30 appeared a letter referring to these articles, headed “Sixty Years Ago," and signed “One who has walked four miles to the Parish School." It described the writer's early home, situated in some lowland parish north of the Tweed, and divided into five or six estates, such as Whinny-hills" and " Weary-faulds," the lairds of which were shortly called "Whinny" or "Weary" after their properties. In this primitive village, where supervision, much less compulsion, in education was never heard of, "no child grew up without learning to read," and the morals of the parish were on the whole good; the children quarrelled, but did not steal. The reader will remember that the second title of Waverley is 'Tis Sixty Years Since.

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repeat catechism. You know, Sir, as you have shown by your comments on the Bishop of Oxford's last speech on this subject, and you could not at present use your influence more beneficially than by farther showing that the real education— the education which alone should be compulsory—means nothing of the kind. It means teaching children to be clean, active, honest, and useful. All these characters can be taught, and cannot be acquired by sickly and ill-dispositioned children without being taught; but they can be untaught to any extent, by evil habit and example at home. Public schools, in which the aim was to form character faithfully, would return them in due time to their parents, worth more than their “weight in gold." That is the real answer to the objections founded on economical difficulties. Will you not make some effort, Sir, to get your readers to feel this? I am myself quite sick of saying it over and over again in vain.

I am, Sir, your faithful servant,

J. RUSKIN.

DENMARK HILL, Jan. 31, 1868.

[From "The Glasgow Herald," June 5, 1874. Also reprinted in "The Times" of June

6, 1874.]

THE VALUE OF LECTURES.1

ROME, 26th May, 1874.

MY DEAR SIR: I have your obliging letter, but am compelled by increase of work to cease lecturing except at Oxford-and practically there also-for, indeed, I find the desire of audi

'This letter was written to Mr. Chapman, of the Glasgow Athenæum Lecture Committee, in reply to a request that Mr. Ruskin would lecture at their meetings during the winter. Writing from Oxford, four years later, in answer to a similar request, Mr. Ruskin wrote as follows: "Nothing can advance art in any district of this accursed machine-and-devil driven England until she changes her mind in many things, and my time for talking is past.—Ever faithfully yours, J. Ruskin. I lecture here, but only on the art of the past." (Extract given in the Times Feb. 12, 1878.)

ences to be audiences only becoming an entirely pestilent character of the age. Everybody wants to hear-nobody to read-nobody to think; to be excited for an hour—and, if possible, amused; to get the knowledge it has cost a man half his life to gather, first sweetened up to make it palatable, and then kneaded into the smallest possible pills-and to swallow it homœopathically and be wise-this is the passionate desire and hope of the multitude of the day.

It is not to be done. A living comment quietly given to a class on a book they are earnestly reading—this kind of lecture is eternally necessary and wholesome; your modern fire-working, smooth-downy-curry-and-strawberry-ice-and-milk-punchaltogether lecture is an entirely pestilent and abominable vanity; and the miserable death of poor Dickens, when he might have been writing blessed books till he was eighty, but for the pestiferous demand of the mob, is a very solemn warning to us all, if we would take it.'

God willing, I will go on writing, and as well as I can. There are three volumes published of my Oxford lectures,' in which every sentence is set down as carefully as may be. If people want to learn from me, let them read them or my monthly letter "Fors Clavigera." If they don't care for these, I don't care to talk to them. Truly yours,

J. RUSKIN.

1 The evil result on Dickens' health of his last series of readings at St. James's Hall, in the early part of 1870, scarcely four months before his death, is thus noted by Mr. Forster: "Little remains to be told that has not in it almost unmixed sorrow and pain. Hardly a day passed, while the readings went on or after they closed, unvisited by some effect or other of the disastrous excitement consequent on them."-Life of Charles Dickens, vol. iii. p. 493.

2 Aratra Pentelici, The Eagle's Nest; and either Val d'Arno (Orpington, 1874) or Lectures on Art (Clarendon Press, 1870).

[Date and place of publication unknown.]

THE CRADLE OF ART!1

18th Feb. 1876.

MY DEAR SIR: I lose a frightful quantity of time because people won't read what I ask them to read, nor believe anything of what I tell them, and yet ask me to talk whenever they think they can take a shilling or two at the door by me. I have written fifty times, if once, that you can't have art where you have smoke; you may have it in hell, perhaps, for the Devil is too clever not to consume his own smoke, if he wants to. But you will never have it in Sheffield. You may learn something about nature, shrivelled, and stones, and iron; and what little you can see of that sort, I'm going to try and show you. But pictures, never.

Ever faithfully yours,

JOHN RUSKIN.

If for no other reason, no artist worth sixpence in a day would live in Sheffield, nor would any one who cared for pictures—for a million a year.

[From "The Sheffield Daily Telegraph," September 7, 1875.]

ST. GEORGE'S MUSEUM.'

BRANTWOOD, CONISTON, LANCASHIRE.

MY DEAR SIR: I am obliged by your note, but the work of the St. George's Company is necessarily distinct from all other. My "museum may be perhaps nothing but a two

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1 This letter was in answer to a request of the Sheffield Society of Ar tists similar to that replied to in the preceding letter.

2 This letter was written in answer to one addressed to Mr. Ruskin by Mr. W. Bragge, F.R.G.S., who, having read in Fors Clavigera of Mr. Ruskin's intention to found the St. George's Museum at Sheffield, wrote to inform him that another museum, in which his might be incorporated, was already in course of building. It was read by Mr. Bragge at a din ner which followed the opening of Western Park to the public on Sep tember 6, 1875.

windowed garret. But it will have in it nothing but what deserves respect in art or admiration in nature. A great museum in the present state of the public mind is simply an exhibition of the possible modes of doing wrong in art, and an accumulation of uselessly multiplied ugliness in misunderstood nature. Our own museum at Oxford is full of distorted skulls, and your Sheffield ironwork department will necessarily contain the most barbarous abortions that human rudeness has ever produced with human fingers. The capitals of the iron shafts in any railway station, for instance, are things to make a man wish-for shame of his species-that he had been born a dog or a bee.

Ever faithfully yours,

J. RUSKIN.

P. S.-I have no doubt the geological department will be well done, and my poor little cabinets will enable your men to use it to better advantage, but would be entirely lost if united with it.

[From "The Daily Telegraph," January 15, 1870.]

THE MORALITY OF FIELD SPORTS.

To the Editor of the "The Daily Telegraph."

SIR: As, thirty years ago,' I publicly expressed a strong opinion on the subject of field sports, and as with more accurate knowledge I hold the same opinion still, and more strongly -will you permit me to place the controversy between your

1 In various parts of Modern Painters. See vol. v. p. 281. "I wish, however, the reader distinctly to understand that the expressions of reprobation of field-sports which he will find scattered through these volumes

refer only to the chase and the turf; that is to say, to hunting shooting, and horse-racing, but not to athletic exercises. I have just as deep a respect for boxing, wrestling, cricketing, and rowing, as contempt of all the various modes of wasting wealth, time, land, and energy of soul, which have been invented by the pride and selfishness of men, in order to enable them to be healthy in uselessness, and get quit of the burdens of their own lives, without condescending to make themselves serviceable to others."

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