RUSKIN MEETS SOME TOURISTS.
"I was fated the other day to come from Venice to Verona with a family—father and mother and two girls—it matters not what country they came from—presumably rich—girls fifteen and eighteen. I never before conceived the misery of people who had evidently spent all their lives in trying to gratify themselves. It was a little warm—warmer than was entirely luxurious—but nothing in the least harmful. They moaned and fidgeted and frowned and puffed and stretched and fanned, and ate lemons, and smelled bottles, and covered their faces, and tore the cover off again, and had not one thought or feeling during five hours of traveling in the most noble part of all the world except what four poor beasts would have had in their end of a menagerie, being dragged about on a hot day. Add to this misery every form of polite vulgarity, in methods of doing and saying the common things they said and did. I never yet saw humanity so degraded (allowing for external circumstances of every possible advantage) given wealth, attainable education and the inheritance of eighteen centuries of Christianity."
—Letter to Charles E. Morton in the Atlantic.
1657
They call him rich; I deem him poor;
Since, if he dares not use his store,
But saves it for his heirs,
The treasure is not his, but theirs.
1658
The generous should be rich, and the rich should be generous.
1659
Very rich men seldom or never whistle; poor men always do.