And I can myself give this much confirmatory evidence of his saying;—that though I never stay in Thanet, the two loveliest skies I have myself ever seen (and next to Turner, I suppose few men of fifty have kept record of so many), were, one at Boulogne, and the other at Abbeville; that is to say, in precisely the correspondent French districts of corn-bearing chalk, on the other side of the Channel.
“And what are pretty skies to us?” perhaps you will ask me: “or what have they to do with the behaviour of that crowd on Margate Pier?”
Well, my friends, the final result of the education I want you to give your children will be, in a few words, this. They will know what it is to see the sky. They will know what it is to breathe it. And they will know, best of all, what it is to behave under it, as in the presence of a Father who is in heaven.
Faithfully yours,
J. RUSKIN.
INJUSTICE.
Drawn thus by Giotto in the chapel of the Arena at Padua.