HORTIIS INCLUSITS.*

THE qualities which charm, astonish, and, alas ! disgust us in all Mr. Ruskin's works, are present in his latest volume. There is the same exquisite beauty of workmanship; the same inimitable power of fitting to every configuration of mountain, flood, and field the exact phrase which will make it real to those who read ; the same eager, chivalrous love for what is good and true; the same childish joy in birds and beasts; and with all these price- less gifts for delighting the world, the same habit of puerile and pedantic scolding. Happily, in a book like the present—a series of familiar letters—in which paradox and playful railing at the world's ways may be taken in good part, we get Mr. Ruskin at his best. We can enjoy what is great in his writing, and may pass what is little as mere affectation, fit to amuse a woman- friend.

The letters, which are selected from a series extending from the year 1874 to 1886, and written from places as various as Florence, Venice, Assisi, Paris, Chartres, Kirkby Lonsdale, and Herne Hill, are addressed to Miss Susie Beever, a neighbour of Mr. Ruskin's in the Lakes. The description of this lady and her sister furnished us by Mr. Ruskin in his preface, is beauti- ful in its tenderness, and in the idyllic charm with which the surroundings of their mountain home are painted :—

"The ladies to whom these letters were written have been, throughout their brightly tranquil lives, at once sources and load. stonesof all good to the village in which they had their home, and to all loving people who cared for the village and its vale and secluded lake, and whatever remained in them or around of the former peace, beauty, and pride of English Shepherd Land. Sources they have been of good, like one of its mountain springs, ever to be found at need. They did not travel ; they did not go up to London in its season ; they did not receive idle visitors to jar or waste their leisure in the waning year. The poor and the sick could find them always; or rather, they watched for and prevented all poverty and pain that care or tenderness could relieve or heal. Loadstones they were, as steadily bringing the light of gentle and wise soots about them as the crest of their guardian mountain gives pause to the morning clouds in themselves, they were types of perfect womanhood in its constant happiness, queens alike of their own hearts and of a Paradise in which they knew the names and sympathised with the spirits of every living creature that God had made to play therein, or to blossom in its sunshine or shade."

Certainly Mr. Raskin's hand has lost none of its cunning. How charming, too, is his saying of Miss Beever !—" Her moments fuller of joy than some people's days."

Mr. Raskin's extraordinary instinctive feeling towards the past, the power which enables him to show us by a phrase like a flash of lightning the characteristics of a bygone age, is well brought out by many of the small reflections scattered up and down the letters. In them, however, we too often see, also, how the unfortunate pedantry and littleness of his nature spoil and caricature his best thoughts. What, for instance, could be truer and more fall of the thought that informs than this ? —"I saw in the Pompeian frescoes—the great characteristic of fallen Rome, in her furious desire of pleasure, and brutal incapability of it." What could be more foolish than the proof and example P—" The walls of Pompeii are covered with paintings meant only to give pleasure, but nothing they repre- sent is beautiful or delightful, and yesterday, among other calumniated and caricatured birds, I saw one of my Susie's pets, a peacock ; and he had only eleven eyes in his tail. Fancy the feverish wretchedness of the humanity which in mere pursuit of pleasure or power had reduced itself to see no more than

eleven eyes in a peacock's ! What were the Cyclops to this ? " No doubt Mr. Raskin is right enough to inveigh against the weary yet frantic materialism of later Rome ; but had ever man such a reason for drawing an indictment against a whole people as this,—they painted peacocks with only eleven eyes in their tails ? Perhaps, if we were to search for the reason that makes Mr. Ruskin habitually think and reason thus, we should find it in the fact that he has not only no touch of humour, but no faintest trace of cynicism. Playfulness he has, and satire;

• Hoven Nohow : Young. train the Wood to the Garden. By John Ruskin, LL.D. George Allen, tionnyolde, Orpington. Sent.

but that wideness of mind which makes a man see things in their true proportions and relations to each other, which, for want of a better word, we may term cynicism that is not cynical, he is absolutely without. For instance, Mr. Ruskin, like a great many others, finds in his old age that the winters are colder than they used to be. It does not occur to him, how- ever, that the change is not in the seasons, and accordingly be writes like this :—

"There is nothing now in the year but autumn and winter. I really begin to think there is some terrible change of climate coming, upon the world for its sin, like another deluge."

Again, take Mr. Ruskin's extraordinary cause of complaint against the modern world arising from the fact that the doves of St. Mark's get under his feet :—

" In old times, when there were not so many idlers about, the doves were used to brisk walkers, and moved away a foot or two in front of one ; but now everybody lounges, or stands talking about the Government, and the doves won't stir till one just touches them ; and I who walk fast am always expecting to tread on them, and it's a nuisance."

Of coarse, as a matter of fact, the Venice of teday is quite as busy, if not busier, than when the Austrians were there ; but Mr. Raskin cannot stop to think of this.

We must, however, in common gratitude, stop our grumbling, and turn to show our appreciation—and it could not be higher —for his delightful book. Certainly not in any other writer of English, probably not in Mr. Ruskin's own works, could a more marvellous description of water in flood be found than that con. tamed in a letter from Bolton Abbey :—

"Bolton Abbey, January 24th, 1875.

"The black rain, much as I growled at it, has let me see Wharfs in flood ; and I would have borne many days in prison to see that. No one need go to the Alps to see wild water. Seldom unless in the Rhine or Rhone themselves at their rapids, have I seen anything much grander. An Alpine stream, besides, nearly always has its bed full of loose stones, and becomes a series of humps and damps of water wherever it is shallow ; while the Wharfe swept round its curves of shore like a black Damascus sabre, coiled into eddies of steel. At the Strid, it had risen eight feet vertical since yesterday, sheeting the flat rooks with foam from side to side, while the treacherous mid- channel was filled with a succession of boiling domes of water, charged through and through with churning white, and rolling oat into the broader stream, each like a vast sea wave bursting on a. beach. There is something in,the soft and comparatively unbroken slopes of these Yorkshire shales which must give the water a peculiar sweeping power, for I have seen Tay and Tammel and Ness, and many a big stream besides, savage enough, but I don't remember anything so grim as this."

We wish it were possible to treat our readers to some of Mr. Ruskin's charming stories and observations as to birds, animals,. and insects. Delightful is the tale of the German doctor who kept tame hornets,—" a whole nest in his study." It is amusing to note that though Mr. Ruskin is relieved to find that wasps are really very amiable creatures, and never get angry without due cause, he adds :—" All the same they have a tiresome way of inspecting one, too closely sometimes, I think." This frank admission is consoling. Even Mr. Ruskin is endowed with that frailty of human nature which makes every man a coward before a wasp. We cannot part from the book without giving an instance of that power to breathe an idyllic sense into passages of profound religious sentiment which is se peculiarly his own :— " Last Sunday I was in a lost church found again,—a church of the second or third century, dug in a green hill of the Campagna, built underground ;—its secret entrance like a sand-martin's nest. Such the temple of the Lord, as the King Solomon of that time had to build it; not 'the mountains of the Lord's house shall be established above the hills,' but the cave of the Lord's house as the fox's hole, beneath them. And here, now lighted by the sun for the first time (for they are still digging the earth from the steps), are the marbles of those early Christian days; the first efforts of their new hope to show itself in enduring record, the new hope of a Good Shepherd :—there they carved Him, with a spring flowing at His feet, and round Him the cattle of the Campagna in which they bad dug their church, the very selfsame goats which this morning have been trotting past my window through tho most populous streets of Rome, innocently following their shepherd, tinkling their bells, and shaking their long spiral horns and white beards; the very same dew-lapped cattle which were that Sunday morning feeding on, the hillside above, carved on the tomb-marbles sixteen hundred years ago."

For such a passage as this We may pardon a world of querulous complainings and unworthy affectations, which, though they annoy us, cannot really mar the work of the greatest living

master of the English language.