[131] This engraving, which formed the frontispiece of “The Oxford Museum,” will be found facing the title page of the present volume, the original plate having proved in excellent condition. O’Shea was, together with others of his name and family, amongst the principal workmen on the building. The capital represents the following ferns: the common hart’s-tongue (scolopendrium vulgare), the northern hard-fern (blechnum boreale), and the male fern (filix mas).
[132] A new armory was to be added to the Castle.
[133] The Literary Gazette of September 26, 1857, after quoting a great part of the previous letter, stated that the new armory was not to be built without all due regard to the preservation of the rock, and that there was therefore no real cause for alarm.
[134] “Poems of the Fancy,” xiv. (1803). The quotation omits two lines after the fourth:
“Who loved the little rock, and set
Upon its head this coronet?”
The second stanza then begins: “Was it the humor of a child?” etc.
[135] The article on taverns occurred in the Daily Telegraph of the 8th December, and commented on a recent meeting of the Licensed Victuallers’ Protection Society. There was also a short article upon drunkenness as a cause of crime in the Daily Telegraph of December 9—referred to by Mr. Ruskin in a letter which will be found in the second volume of this book. The article on castles concluded with an appeal for public subscriptions towards the restoration of Warwick Castle, then recently destroyed by fire.
[136] The passage alluded to is partly as follows. “It happened also, which was the real cause of my bias in after-life, that my father had a real love of pictures.... Accordingly, wherever there was a gallery to be seen, we stopped at the nearest town for the night; and in reverentest manner I thus saw nearly all the noblemen’s houses in England; not indeed myself at that age caring for the pictures, but much for castles and ruins, feeling more and more, as I grew older, the healthy delight of uncovetous admiration, and perceiving, as soon as I could perceive any political truth at all, that it was probably much happier to live in a small house and have Warwick Castle to be astonished at, than to live in Warwick Castle, and have nothing to be astonished at; and that, at all events, it would not make Brunswick Square in the least more pleasantly habitable to pull Warwick Castle down. And, at this day, though I have kind invitations enough to visit America, I could not, even for a couple of months, live in a country so miserable as to possess no castles.”
[137] In a second article upon the same subject the Daily Telegraph had expressed surprise at Mr. Ruskin’s former letter. “Who does not remember,” it wrote, “his proposal to buy Verona, so as to secure from decay the glorious monuments in it?”
[138] This letter, it will be noticed, was written during the bombardment and a few days before the capitulation of Paris in 1871.