"Ruskin et la bible"—who would have expected it?—is the title of a French book, written by a science professor, and published in Paris.

We all know that his works, from "Modern Painters" to "Præterita," are full of the Bible. Sometimes his allusions and quotations are merely ornamental, and sometimes his remarks are sharp enough to pain the reader; for Ruskin went through many phases of faith, or, rather, through a long period of doubt, from which he came, in his later years, into a new and very simple acceptance of the Christian hope. But at all times he took the Bible seriously, and in many a passage he has made its thoughts and stories live for us with marvellous reality. Hear him tell the Death of Moses or the Call of Peter in those well-known pages of his masterpiece, or follow him in "Fors" through unpalatable deductions from neglected commands, and you cannot but feel that he was a great preacher, "a man of one book," and that book was the Bible.

How he was brought up upon it he tells us in his autobiography. In Coniston Museum not the least interesting of the Ruskin relics is the Bible from which, as he noted on the fly-leaf, his mother taught him the paraphrases. Turning it over one sees how the parts he has named as especially studied, Psalm cxix. above all, have been soiled; for even little John Ruskin, model of home-bred boys, was like Tommy Grimes the scamp—he couldn't always be good—and continual thumbing embrowns the page.

It was his mother to whom he owed this youthful training in a close knowledge of the text, "without note or comment." This was her Bible in the earlier days. Later in life she laid the somewhat worn volume aside for a new one, a nonpareil Oxford Bible with references, 1852, with inscription in her husband's handwriting—

MARGARET RUSKIN
DENMARK HILL
BOUGHT AT DOVER 13 MAY, 1858

—and a bearded thistle-head is fastened for a memento on the fly-leaf. To the end of her life she read in it every day, and every day learned two verses by heart; she has pencilled on the margins the dates in her last two years, 1870 and 1871; and after the daily reading she always put the volume away in its yellow silk bag with purple strings. This curious habit of dating came out also in her son's old age; perhaps the modern psychologist will diagnose in it some form of degeneracy, but in old times dates were important from a lingering respect for astrology, which is betrayed—most likely unintended—in the precision with which John Ruskin's father noted the exact hour of his birth. It is in a Baskett Bible of 1741, with engraved title-page, and a pencil drawing, probably by John in his boyhood, stuck in as a sort of frontispiece—a copy from a picture of Jesus Mocked. Opposite to it is written: "John Ruskin, son of John James Ruskin and Margaret Ruskin, Born 8 February 1819 at ¼ past 7 o'clock Morning. Babtized (sic) 20 Feby 1819 by the Revd Mr. Boyd"—the father, I understand, of "A.K.H.B." To emphasise the Scottish character of the family one may note that this volume has bound up with it at the end "The Psalms of David in Meeter," printed at Edinburgh, 1738. It is most curious that Mr. J. J. Ruskin, a distinctly well-educated man, should have made the mistake in spelling, and carried on the old tradition of providing material for the horoscope.

(Miss Hargreaves, photographer)

THE BIBLE FROM WHICH RUSKIN LEARNT IN CHILDHOOD, AND HIS GREEK MS. PSALTER