[91] This refers to a letter in which the writer gave an account of a robbery by a housemaid, and, drawing from her conduct the moral "put not your trust in London servants," concluded by signing his letter, "Ab hoc disce omnes."
[92] The last volume of Bishop Colenso's work on "The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua critically examined" was published in the April of the year in which these letters were written, and his deposition by the Bishop of Capetown had but recently been reversed by the Privy Council. It is to the discussion aroused by his book that Mr. Ruskin indirectly refers.
[93] The leader in the Art-Journal is Chapter vi. of "The Cestus of Aglaia," where "the infinite follies of modern thought, centred in the notion that liberty is good for a man, irrespectively of the use he is likely to make of it," are discussed at some length. The epitaphs quoted are not in the Idler itself, but in the "Essay on Epitaphs" printed at the end of some editions of it.
[94] This refers to a letter signed "W. B." in the Daily Telegraph of September 12.
[95] Charlotte Winsor was at this time under sentence of death for the murder of a child, which had been entrusted to her charge. I have been unable to verify the anecdote of her heroic anti-type.
[96] The "admirable article" which had closed the discussion advised mistresses to resemble those of the good old days, and to deserve good servants, if they wished to secure them. It, somewhat inconsistently with the previous articles, declared that the days of good service would not be found altogether past, if it was remembered that by derivation "domestic" meant "homelike," and "family" one's servants, not one's children.
[97] See "The Economist of Xenophon," since (1875) translated and published in the "Bibliotheca Pastorum," edited by Mr. Ruskin (vol. i. p. 50, chap. vii. §§ 37-43). Mr. Ruskin in his preface to the volume speaks of the book as containing "first, a faultless definition of wealth" ... "secondly, the most perfect ideal of kingly character and kingly government given in literature" ... and "thirdly, the ideal of domestic life." It may be interesting to note an earlier and quaint estimate of the work, given in "Xenophon's Treatise of Housholde—imprinted at London, in Fleet Street, by T. Berthelet, 1534," where the dialogue is described as "ryght counnyngly translated out of the Greke tongue into Englysshe by Gentian Hervet at the desyre of Mayster Geffrey Pole, whiche boke for the welthe of this realme I deme very profitable to be red."