FOOTNOTES:
[5] A misprint for "Rogues." See next letter, p. [13].
[6] "Magnificent weather and excellent sport made the great people's meeting pass off with great éclat." ("Annual Register" for 1859, p. 73.) The race was won by Sir J. Hawley's Musjid.
[7] The mother of the present Emperor, whose treatment by Napoleon I., and whose own admirable qualities, have won for her the tender and affectionate memory of her people. She died in 1810. Her tomb at Charlottenburg is the work of the German sculptor, Christian Rauch.
[8] The full height of this statue (also the work of Rauch) is, inclusive of the pedestal, somewhat over forty-two feet from the ground. One of the bas-relief tablets which flank the pedestal represents the Apotheosis of the monarch. The visitor to Berlin may recall August Kiss's bronze group, representing the combat of an Amazon with a tiger, on the right side of the Old Museum steps; and Holbein's portrait of George Gyzen, a merchant of London, is No. 586 in the picture galleries of the Museum. It is described by Mr. Ruskin in his article on "Sir Joshua and Holbein" in the Cornhill Magazine of March, 1860, and also in Wornum's "Life and Works of Holbein," p. 260 (London, 1867).
[From "The Scotsman," August 6, 1859.]
THE ITALIAN QUESTION.
Schaffhausen, August 1, 1859.
Letter to the Editor (of "The Scotsman").
Sir: I have just received the number of the Scotsman containing my second letter from Berlin, in which there is rather an awkward misprint of "royals" for "rogues," which must have puzzled some of your readers, no less than the general tone of the letter, written as it was for publication at another time, and as one of a series begun in another journal. I am obliged by the admission of the letter into your columns; and I should have been glad to continue in those columns the series I intended, had not the refusal of this letter by the Witness[9] shown me the liability to misapprehension under which I should be writing. I had thought that, seeing for these twenty years I have been more or less conversant with Italy and the Italians, a few familiar letters written to a personal friend, at such times as I could win from my own work, might not have been uninteresting to Scottish readers, even though my opinions might occasionally differ sharply from theirs, or be expressed in such rough way as strong opinions must be, when one has no time to polish them into more pleasing presentability. The refusal of the letter by the Witness showed me that this was not so; and as I have no leisure to take up the subject methodically, I must leave what I have written in its present imperfect form. It is indeed not mainly a question of time, which I would spend gladly, though to handle the subject of the present state of Italy with any completeness would involve a total abandonment of other work for some weeks. But I feel too deeply in this matter to allow myself to think of it continuously. To me, the state of the modern political mind, which hangs the slaughter of twenty thousand men, and the destinies of twenty myriads of human souls, on the trick that transforms a Ministry, or the chances of an enlarged or diminished interest in trade, is something so horrible that I find no utterance wherewith to characterize it—nor any courage wherewith to face the continued thought of it, unless I had clear expectation of doing good by the effort—expectation which the mere existence of the fact forbids. I leave therefore the words I have written to such work as they may; hoping, indeed, nothing from any words; thankful, if a few people here and there understand and sympathize in the feelings with which they were written; and thankful, if none so sympathize, that I am able at least to claim some share in the sadness, though not in the triumph, of the words of Farinata—
"Fu' io sol colà, dove sofferto
Fu per ciascun di torre via Fiorenza,
Colui che la difese a viso aperto."[10]
I am, etc., J. Ruskin.