[From "The Autographic Mirror," December 23 and 30, 1865.]
LETTER TO MR. W. H. HARRISON.[176]
Dear Mr. Harrison: The plate I send is unluckily merely outlined in its principal griffin (it is just being finished), but it may render your six nights' work a little more amusing. I don't want it back.
Never mind putting "see to quotations," as I always do. And, in the second revise, don't look to all my alterations to tick them off, but merely read straight through the new proof to see if any mistake strikes you. This will be more useful to me than the other.
Most truly yours, with a thousand thanks,
J. Ruskin.
FOOTNOTES:
[176] A facsimile of this letter, from a collection of autographs in the possession of Mr. T. F. Dillon Croker, appeared in the above-named issue of the Autographic Mirror. The subject of the letter will be made clearer by the following passages from Mr. Ruskin's reminiscence of Mr. William Henry Harrison, published in the University Magazine of April, 1878, under the title of "My First Editor."—"1st February, 1878. In seven days more I shall be fifty-nine; which (practically) is all the same as sixty; but being asked by the wife of my dear old friend, W. H. Harrison, to say a few words of our old relations together, I find myself, in spite of all these years, a boy again—partly in the mere thought of, and renewed sympathy with, the cheerful heart of my old literary master, and partly in instinctive terror lest, wherever he is in celestial circles, he should catch me writing bad grammar, or putting wrong stops, and should set the table turning, or the like.... Not a book of mine, for good thirty years, but went, every word of it, under his careful eyes twice over—often also the last revises left to his tender mercy altogether on condition he wouldn't bother me any more."—The book to which the letter refers may be the "Stones of Venice," and the plate sent the third ("Noble and Ignoble Grotesque"), in the last volume of that work; and if this be so, the letter was probably written from Herne Hill about 1852-3.