Another Baskett Bible of 1749, nicely rebound in old red morocco, handsomely tooled, bears the family's earliest register. It is written in a big, unscholarly hand in the blank space of the last page of Maccabees; for this volume contained an Apocrypha, and the page becoming worn, it was stuck down on the cover. "John Ruskin, Baptized Aprill 9th, 1732 O.S." (i.e., 1733 new style), and then follow the children of this John, with dates and hours of birth, between 1756 and 1772—Margaret, Mary, William, John Thomas, Elizabeth, Robert, and James. John Thomas, born October 22, 1761, was the father of John James, the father of John. Like many other remarkable men who owed their fame to their powers rather than to their circumstances, Ruskin came of a line of decent, respectable, bourgeois folk, who read their Bibles, "feared God, and took their own part when required."
His earliest literary training, so to say, was closely connected with Bible study: for every Sunday he had to take notes of the sermon and write out a report of the discourse. One of his childish sermon-books is preserved in the Coniston Museum, and a page is reproduced here to show the care of writing and choice of wording insisted upon. In the stories and verses with which he amused himself, he learned a good deal of freedom and ease: in these he learned dignity of style, a corrective to boyish flippancy. Also he got the habit of thinking with his pen, so that he nearly always scribbled when most people would only meditate. His father's Bible (a small pica 8vo, Oxford edition of 1846, on the fly-leaf "Margaret Ruskin to her husband John James Ruskin, 1850," finely rebound in tawny leather, gilt) was used by him in later times, and side-lined vigorously; all the blank spaces are scribbled over with the thoughts that came as he read.
(Miss Brickhill, photographer)
A PAGE FROM ONE OF THE SERMON-BOOKS WRITTEN BY RUSKIN AS A BOY
There is a grand Old Testament in Greek MS. The back is lettered "tenth century," but Dr. Caspar René Gregory, who spent some time in examining the books at Brantwood, pointed out that the Greek date for 1463 could be dimly seen printed off from the lost final leaf. It was bound in vellum in or after 1817, to judge from the water-mark in the fly-leaves; the binding alone is worm-eaten, leaving the body of the book untouched. The pages, a little waterstained, are written large and quaint with the reed pen, and adorned with strips of painted pattern and Byzantine portraits of the authors of the books—Solomon as a young king, Isaiah and the prophets in varying phases of grey-bearded dignity and elaborate robes of many colours, rather coarsely but very richly painted. Such a book to most would be quite too sacred for anything but occasional turning with careful finger-tips, or a paper-knife delicately inserted at the outer margin of the leaves; not to say too crabbed in its contractions and old style calligraphy to be read with ease. But Ruskin read it, and annotated as he read. He did the same with the Greek Psalter in the Coniston Museum, shown in the illustration on [p. 197]; he did it still more copiously, and in ink, not merely in erasable pencil, in his most valuable tenth-century Greek Gospels, or rather Book of Lessons, from which we have a page photographed. I am very far from saying that this is a practice to be imitated; but any one who wishes to follow Ruskin in his more intimate thoughts on the Bible, at the time of crisis in 1875 when he was busy on this book, and when he was beginning to turn from the agnostic attitude of his middle life to the old-fashioned piety of his age—any one who wants to get at his mind would find it here.
