TWO BOOKS OF RUSKIN'S—A "NUREMBERG CHRONICLE" AND HIS POCKET "HORACE"
Of poetry and belles-lettres he had a great assortment, as might be expected, and mostly in volumes interesting for their history, though not chosen as rare editions. He kept his grandfather's "Burns," his father's "Byron," his own college "Aristophanes," with copious lecture-notes and sketches of the Poetry of Architecture in blank spaces. He had Morris's "Earthly Paradise," "from his friend the author"; a "Linnæus" that had belonged to Ray, the great Cumbrian botanist; "A Dyaloge of Syr Thomas More Knyghte" (1530), with the neat autograph, "ffrancis Bacons booke," apparently that of the famous Lord Bacon; and, of course, his Scott manuscripts have been often described by visitors to Brantwood. One little token of unexpected reverence for a name which hasty readers might think was not to be spoken in Ruskin's study, is a tiny duodecimo in yellow silk—"Dialogo di Antonio Manetti," about the size, form, and measurements of Dante's Hell—inscribed apparently by the great artist "di Michelagnol Buonarroti."
Greek authors, and a few translations like Jowett's "Plato"; Missals and Bibles in mediæval Greek and Latin; a few old printed books—"Danthe" (1491), and a couple more "fourteeners"—but only on subjects in which he was interested, such as heraldry—Randle Holmes (1688), and Guillim (1638), coloured by Ruskin and much marked; Douglas's "Virgil" (1553), Chapman's "Homer," the original "Cowley" of 1668, various copies of "Poliphilo," together with standard poets, complete what may be called the bric-à-brac of the shelves above the mineral collection. Some readers of Omar Khayyam may be interested in his dissent to stanza 34, and energetic assent to 21, 25, 45 and 46, scored on the margins in the edition of 1879; and some of his artistic readers, will they be sympathetic or scandalised at his collection of Rodolph Toepffer's Genevese caricatures? There is very little about Art in all these lines of books: Millingen's "Greek Vases," and the still greater work of Lenormant and De Witte are there indeed, but the only other art books are those of two old friends, Prout's "Sketches at Home and Abroad," and Harding's "Elementary Art."
Some of the books he used for special work are in other parts of the house, and many must have been sold or given away when they were done with. A number of those he gave away are in a case at the Coniston Museum, from which we photograph a fine Nuremberg Chronicle side by side with the tiny "Horace" he used to carry in his pocket on journeys abroad. In his bedroom he kept a great deal of favourite reading for wakeful nights—Carlyle and Helps, Scott and Byron, Shakespeare and Spenser, Miss Edgeworth and Madame de Genlis, and the books of his youth, a most curious collection of dingy antiquity, with not a few French novels: and elsewhere are the ponderous tomes from which he gleaned. His work was not done without much reference to books; but, after all, it was never compilation. Perhaps it is a truism, but this look round Ruskin's library gives it some freshness and force—that the writing which makes its mark in the world is not the second-hand, patchwork sort, however laborious and however learned. He looked at Nature, and wrote down what he saw; he felt deeply, and wrote what he felt.
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RUSKIN'S BIBLES
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RUSKIN'S BIBLES