42.
April 23rd 1881.
My dear Malleson,—These passages of description and illustration of the general aspect of Ephesus in St. Paul's time seem to me much more forcibly and artistically written than anything you did in the "Life of Christ"; and I could not suggest any changes to you which you could now carry out under the conditions of time to revise, except a more clear statement of the Ephesian goddess.
[I really do not think Mr. Ruskin would wish that all he wrote in the next sentence about the Ephesian Diana should be placed before the public eye. But I resume in the middle of a sentence.]
... practically at last and chiefly of the Diabolic Suction of the Usurer; and her temple, which you luckily liken to the Bank of England, was in fact what that establishment would be as the recognised place of pious pilgrimage for all Jews, infidels, or prostitutes in the realm of England. You could not conceive the real facts of these degraded worships of the mixed Greek and Asiatic races, unless you gave a good year's work to the study of the decline of Greek art in the 3rd and 4th centuries b.c.
Charles Newton's pride in discovering Mausolus, and engineers' whistling over his Asiatic mummy, have entirely corrupted and thwarted the uses of the British Museum Art Galleries. The Drum of that Diana Temple is barbarous rubbish, not worth tenpence a ton; and if I shewed you a photograph of the head of Mausolus without telling you what it was, I will undertake that you saw with candid eyes in it nothing more than the shaggy poll of a common gladiator. But your book will swim with the tide. It is best so.
43.
July....
I'm not in the least anxious about my MS., and shall only be glad if you like to keep it long enough to read thoroughly. There must surely be published copies of such extant, though, and worth enquiring after?
Partly the fine weather, partly the heat, partly a fit of Scott and Byron have stopped the Epilogue utterly for the time! You cannot be in any hurry for it surely? There's plenty to go on printing with.