NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.
I have mislaid, just when I wanted it, a valuable letter, which gave me the first name of Abbotsford accurately,—Clarty Hole being only a corruption of it, and the real name bearing no such sense. I shall come upon it some time or other: meantime, my Scottish readers must not suppose I mean that the treatment of rivers is worse in North than in South Britain,—only they have prettier streams in Scotland to float their paraffin, or other beautiful productions of modern art, or nature, on the top of. We had one or two clear streams in Surrey, indeed; but as I was investigating the source of one of them, only the other day, I found a police office had been built over it, and that the authorities had paid five hundred pounds to construct a cesspool, with a huge iron cylinder conducting to it, through the spring. Excavating, I found the fountain running abundantly, round the pipe.
The following paragraph, and the two subjoined letters, appeared in the same impression of the ‘Daily Telegraph,’ on the 12th January, 1871. I wish to preserve them in Fors; and I print them in this number, because the succession of the first four names in the statement of the journal, associated with that of the first magistrate of the City of London, in connection with the business in hand that day, is to me the most pleasant piece of reading—and I think must be to all of us among the most significant—that has lately met our eyes in a public print; and it means such new solemn league and covenant as Scott had been fain to see. My letter about the Italian streams may well follow what I have said of Scottish ones.
The French Appeal to England.
“We are happy to announce farther contributions to the fund which is being raised in response to the appeal of the Bishop of Versailles and the clergy of the Seine-et-Oise department; and also to state that, in addition to those influential persons whom we named yesterday as being ready to serve on a committee, two other gentlemen of high official and social position have consented to join the body. The list at present is as follows: The Lord Bishop of London; Dr. Manning, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster; the Rev. Dr. Brock, the Baptist minister; Mr. Alfred de Rothschild; and the Lord Mayor, who has courteously placed the Mansion House at the service of the committee. Besides these names, the members of the ‘Paris Food Fund,’ as will be seen from the subjoined letter, propose to join the more comprehensive organization.”
To the Editor of the Daily Telegraph.
“Sir,—Acting on your suggestion that the ‘Paris Food Fund,’ which I yesterday described to you, might be advantageously united with that which has been suggested by the Bishop of Versailles, I beg to say that Archbishop Manning, Professor Huxley, Sir John Lubbock, and Mr. Ruskin will, with myself, have great pleasure in forming part of such a public committee as you have advised, and in placing the subscriptions already sent to us at its disposal.
“I am, sir, your obedient servant,
“James T. Knowles.”
“Jan. 11.”
Daily Telegraph, Jan. 12, 1871.
Roman Inundations.
To the Editor of the Daily Telegraph.
“Sir,—May I ask you to add to your article on the inundation of the Tiber some momentary invitation to your readers to think with Horace rather than to smile with him?
“In the briefest and proudest words he wrote of himself, he thought of his native land chiefly as divided into the two districts of violent and scanty waters:
Dicar, qua violens obstrepit Aufidus,
Et qua, pauper aquæ, Daunus agrestium
Regnavit populorum.
“Now the anger and power of that tauriformis Aufidus is precisely because regna Dauni præfluit—because it flows past the poor kingdoms which it should enrich. Stay it there, and it is treasure instead of ruin. And so also with Tiber and Eridanus. They are so much gold, at their sources,—they are so much death, if they once break down unbridled into the plains.
“At the end of your report of the events of the inundation, it is said that the King of Italy expressed ‘an earnest desire to do something, as far as science and industry could effect it, to prevent or mitigate inundations for the future.’
“Now, science and industry can do, not ‘something,’ but everything; and not merely to mitigate inundations—and, deadliest of inundations, because perpetual—maremmas; but to change them into national banks instead of debts.
“The first thing the King of any country has to do is to manage the streams of it.
“If he can manage the streams, he can also the people; for the people also form alternately torrent and maremma, in pestilential fury or pestilential idleness. They also will change into living streams of men, if their Kings literally ‘lead them forth beside the waters of comfort.’ Half the money lost by this inundation of Tiber, spent rightly on the hill-sides last summer, would have changed every wave of it into so much fruit and foliage in spring, where now they will be only burning rock. And the men who have been killed within the last two months, and whose work, and the money spent in doing it, have filled Europe with misery which fifty years will not efface, had they been set at the same cost to do good instead of evil, and to save life instead of destroy it, might, by this 10th of January, 1871, have embanked every dangerous stream at the roots of the Rhine, the Rhone, and the Po, and left to Germany, to France, and to Italy an inheritance of blessing for centuries to come—they and their families living all the while in brightest happiness and peace. And now! Let the Red Prince look to it; red inundation bears also its fruit in time.
“I am, sir, your obedient servant,
“John Ruskin.”
“Jan. 10.”
Daily Telegraph, Jan. 12, 1871.
Sunday Playthings.
Sunday Playthings.
The Superbe Suisse and his Bear.
1 Fourth Report of Rivers Pollution Commission, p. 52. ↑
2 See Analysis of Water of Leith, the Foul Burn, and Pow Burn, same Report, p. 21. ↑
3 Same Report; so also the River Almond, pp. 22–45. ↑
5 Blood-hound, from ‘lym,’ Saxon for leash. ↑
6 Introduction to Border Minstrelsy, p. 86. ↑
7 “The Capacity and Extent of the Human Understanding; exemplified in the extraordinary case of Automathes, a young nobleman who was accidentally left in his infancy upon a desolate island, and continued nineteen years in that solitary state, separate from all human society.” By John Kirkby. 1745. Small 8vo. ↑
8 It is impossible to concentrate the vulgar modern vices of art and literature more densely than has been done in this—in such kind, documental—book. Here is a description of the ‘Queen of the Flowers’ out of it, which is so accurately characteristic of the ‘imagination’ of an age of demand and supply, that I must find space for it in small print. She appears in a wood in which “here and there was a mulberry tree disporting itself among the rest.” (Has Mr. Huguessen, M.P., ever seen a mulberry tree, or read as much of Pyramus and Thisbe as Bottom?)
“The face was the face of a lady, and of a pretty, exceedingly good-humoured lady too; but the hair which hung down around her head”—(the author had better have written hung up)—“was nothing more or less than festoons of roses,—red, lovely, sweet-scented” (who would have thought it!) “roses; the arms were apparently entirely composed of cloves and” (allspice? no) “carnations; the body was formed of a multitude of various flowers—the most beautiful you can imagine, and a cloak of honeysuckle and sweetbriar was thrown carefully over the shoulders.” (Italics mine—care being as characteristic of the growth of the honeysuckle as disport is that of the mulberry.) ↑
9 Robert, who comes to visit them in Bath, to little Walter’s great joy. ↑
FORS CLAVIGERA.
