several Acts of Parliament relating to such matters. It is not a legal trust of a charitable nature, if by that term be meant a trust which is liable to the supervision or interference of the Charity Commissioners. It is a number of persons unincorporated, but associated for other purposes than that of gain. It is on a similar footing to such a society as that for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge. The Master will be personally responsible for the debts of the Company contracted by his order. If you desire to have a legal Company, or the supervision of the Charity Commissioners, you must give way in many points which you have hitherto considered indispensable to your scheme. On the 29th February last we sent you a specimen of the form in which we proposed to draw up the memorandum for each Companion to subscribe. If you will return us this with any remarks upon it which may occur to you, we will at once have it engrossed, and send it you to be signed by all the Companions. We were expecting a call from you when you were in town some time since, and should have then discussed this subject with you, and also the subject of the trust deed which will have to be executed by the Master of the Company. We will act upon your suggestion, and forward the deed of the Sheffield property to Mr. Bagshawe. Shall I also send all the title deeds to him relating to the property? Tell me this. PROFESSOR RUSKIN, ARTHUR SEVERN, ESQ., HERNE HILL, S. E. (Answer.) Faithfully yours, W. P. TARRANT. Patterdale, 6th May, 1876. DEAR MR. TARRANT,-I was surprised and vexed by the opening of your letter of 25th April, showing that you had not in the least hitherto understood the scope or meaning of my present work. There is not the smallest unfriendliness in my publication of your account. No client ever had occasion to do it before, of course ;-you never had a client before engaged in steady and lifelong contest with the existing principles of the Law, the Church, and the Army,-had you? The publication of your accounts of course can do you no harm, if they are fair; nor have, or had I, the slightest idea of their being otherwise. All accounts for St. George are to be printed: the senders-in must look to the consequences. The delay in my returning your draft of the rules of Company is because every lawyer I speak to tells me of a new difficulty. The whole piece of business, you remember, arose from my request to you simply to secure a piece of ground to our trustees, which had been given us by Mr. Baker. Now I find at the last moment that neither Mr. Baker nor anybody else can give us a piece of land at all, but must sell it us. Next, I want to know if this form, as you have drawn it up, is approved by me, what are you going to do with it? What is the good of it? Will the writing of it in black letter make us a legal company, like a railway company, capable of holding land? Do the Charity Commissioners interfere with their business? or must we blow some people to bits or smash them into jelly, to prove our want of charity, and get leave, therefore, to do what we like with our own? Fix your minds, and Mr. Barber's, on this one point-the grip of the land. If you can't give us that, send us in your accounts, and let us be done with the matter. If you can, on the document as it stands, write it out on the rubbish your modern stationers call parchment, and do what you will with it, so. 20. I am really ashamed to give any farther account, just now, of the delays in our land work, or of little crosses and worries blocking my first attempt at practice. One of the men whom I thought I had ready for this Worcestershire land, being ordered, for trial, to do a little bit of rough work in Yorkshire that I might not torment Mr. Baker with his freshmanship, threw up the task at once, writing me a long letter of which one sentence was enough for me,-that "he would do his share, but no more." These infernal notions of Equality and Independence are so rooted, now, even in the best men's minds, that they don't so much as know even what Obedience or Fellowship means! Fancy one of Nelson's or Lord Cochrane's 2 men retreating from his gun, with the avowed resolution to "do no more than his share"! However, I know there's good in this man, and I doubt not he will repent, and break down no more; but I shall not try him again for a year. And I must be forgiven my St. George's accounts this month. I really can't let the orchises and hyacinths go out of flower while I'm trying to cast sums; and I've been two whole days at work on the purple marsh orchis alone, which my botanical readers will please observe is in St. George's schools to be called "Porphyria veris," "Spring Purplet." It is, I believe, Ophelia's "long purple."3 3 There are a quantity of new names to be invented for the whole tribe, their present ones being not by St. George endurable. 21. The subjoined letter gives me great pleasure: it is from a son of my earliest Oxford friend: who, as his father helped me in educating myself, is now helping me in the education of others. I print it entire; it may give some of my readers an idea of the minor hindrances which meet one at every step, and take as much time to conquer as large ones. The work to be done is to place a series of the simple chemical elements as "Imps" in a pretty row of poetical Bottles at Sheffield." "BROAD STREET, OXFORD, March 30, 1876. "MY DEAR MR. RUSKIN,-I knocked in vain at your 'oak' last night when I came to Corpus to report progress, and also to ask you two questions, which must be put to you by letter, as there is not much time to lose if you wish to have the alkaline earths ready by the time you go to Sheffield. Firstly, do you wish me to see about getting the metals of the alkalies, and if so which of them do you 1 [The draftsman: see above, p. 376.] [For another reference to Lord Cochrane (afterwards Earl of Dundonald), see Vol. XXVII. p. 153.] 3 [Hamlet, Act iv. sc. 7. The drawing was engraved for Proserpina: see Vol. XXV. p. 341, and Plate XXIII. Ultimately Ruskin called it "Contorta Pur purea, "Purple Wreath-wort."] [This, however, was not done.] want? Some of them are extremely expensive,-calcium, for instance, being 2d. a grain; but then, as it is very light, a very small quantity would be required as a specimen. The other questions were about the amount of the oxides, and about the shape of the bottles to hold them. I have in your absence chosen some long sample bottles which are very beautiful of their kind, and even if they do not meet your approval they can easily be changed when you return to Oxford. I am progressing fairly well with the earths-Magnesia is ready; Alumina and Baryta partly made, but not yet pure, for it is not more easy in chemistry to get a perfect thing than in any other matter with which man has anything to do, and to-day I have been extremely unfortunate with the Baryta, having tried two methods of making it, broken four crucibles, and, worst of all, failed to make it in a state of purity: however, I shall have one more try to-morrow, and no doubt shall succeed. If there is any chance of your being in Oxford before Easter, I will not make the Silica, since the process is very beautiful, and one which no doubt you would like to see. Please excuse the length of my letter, and believe me, Affectionately yours, 22. (II.) Affairs of the Master. "THEODORE D. ACLAND." I am aghast at the columnar aspect of any account given in satisfactory detail; and will only gradually, as I have space, illustrate my own expenditure and its course. That unexplained hundred of last month,1 diminished Klein (final account on dismissal to Rotterdam, paying his Downs, for my London quarterly pensioners Morley (Oxford bookbinding). Easter presents Leaving a balance of to be added to the £200 of personal expenses in this month's accounts. About a hundred and twenty of this has gone in a fortnight's posting, with Mr. and Mrs. Severn, from London to Coniston, stopping to see St. Albans, Peterborough, Croyland, Stamford and Burleigh, Grantham, Newark, Lincoln, our new ground at Sheffield, Pomfret, Knaresborough, Ripon, Fountain's, Richmond, Mortham Tower, and Brougham Castle.2 A pleasant life, you think? Yes, if I led an unpleasant one, however dutiful, I could not write any of my books; least of all, Fors. But I am glad, if you honestly think it a pleasant life; why, if so, my richer readers, do you drive only round the parks, every day, instead of from place to place through England, learning a thing or two on the road? Of the rest of the "self" money, I leave further account till next month; it is not all gone yet. I give, however, for a typical example, one of Downs's weekly bills, reaching the symmetrical total of £7, 7s. 7d., or a guinea and a penny a day, which I think is about the average. Of the persons named therein as receiving weekly wage, Hersey is our old under-gardener, now rheumatic, and as little able to earn his dinner as I am myself; Rusch, my old lapidary, who 1 [See above, p. 608.] [For an account of Ruskin's driving tours at this time, see Vol. XXIV. pp. xxvii.-xxxi.] cuts in the course of the week what pebbles he can for me; Best, an old coachman, who used to come to us from livery-stable on occasion, and now can't drive any more; Christy, an old woman who used to work for my mother. After thus much of miniature illustration, I have only to explain of the broad effects in the account below, that my Oxford secretary, who has £200 a year, does such work for me connected with my Professorship as [The "Oxford Secretary" was the Rev. St. John Tyrwhitt, for whom see Vol. XV. pp. xxx., 6. The " younger secretary" was Laurence Hilliard.] only a trained scholar could do, leaving me free here to study hyacinths. I wish I could give him the Professorship itself, but must do as I am bid by Oxford. My younger secretary, who has £100 a year, is this year put into office, for St. George's correspondence; and I must beg my good friends-now, I am thankful to say, gathering a little to St. George's work,not to think themselves slighted in being answered by his hand, for mine is weary. "MY DEAR RUSKIN,-I enclose two extracts, cut from the same day's paper, which contain so grimly humorous a parallel between the ways in which the 'Protestant Church" and the world' are engaged in 'obliterating all traces of the Virgin Mary,' that I thought you might possibly use them in Fors or elsewhere. "Yours affectionately, "C. PATMORE." 2 (The following are the two extracts. Before giving them, I must reply to my greatly honoured and loved friend, that both the Bristol destroyers of images and New York destroyers of humanity, are simply-Lost Sheep 1 [Raffaelle Carloforti, the artist: see above, p. 583.] [This letter is reprinted by Mr. Basil Champneys in his Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore, 1900, vol. ii. p. 290, where also (p. 291) the following note in reply from Ruskin is given : "BRANTWOOD, CONISTON, LANCASHIRE. "DEAR PATMORE,-Yes, those are two notable paragraphs. I've sent them to the printer with your letter,-keeping brickmakers' for another time. "Ever affectionately yours, "J. R." At about the same time Patmore must have written the letter about "brickmakers," which Ruskin afterwards printed in Letter 80, § 7 (Vol. XXIX. p. 177).] |