FOOTNOTE:
[2] My dear Sir,—What in the Devil's name should I do at your assemblage of notorieties? I neither care nor wish to care whom you elect. The only Gardiner I ever heard of was Henry's Bloody Bishop. If "Kiss me Hardy" came before us, it would be worth while for the only true Tory left in England to vote for him; but he has been with God this good half century. My £100 a year as Academician—recoverable, they tell me, in case of lapsed payment, from Her Majesty herself—I spend in perfecting my collection of the palates of molluscs, who keep their inward economy as clean as the deck of a ship of the line with stratagems beautiful and manifold exceedingly. Few of your Academicians show an apparatus half so handsome when they open their mouths. How unlike am I, by the way, in my retirement, from Bismarck across the waters, who squeaks like a puppy-dog on his road to the final parliamentary sausage-making machine of these poor times. Would it not be well for your English Academy, instead of these election follies, to bestir itself with a copy of The Crown of Wild Olive for his heart's betterment? But keep your Lydian modes; I hold my Dorian.—Ever faithfully yours, John Ruskin.