PREFACE TO THE EDITION OF 1880

§ 1. I NEVER intended to have republished this book, which has become the most useless I ever wrote; the buildings it describes with so much delight being now either knocked down, or scraped and patched up into smugness and smoothness more tragic than uttermost ruin.¹

But I find the public still like the book-and will read it, when they won’t look at what would be really useful and helpful to them;-and as the germ of what I have since written is indeed here,-however overlaid with gilding, and overshot, too splashily and cascade-fashion, with gushing of words,-here it is given again in the old form; all but some pieces of rabid and utterly false Protestantism,² which are cut out from text and appendix alike, and may serve still to give the old editions some value yet, in the eyes of book collectors and persons studious (as the modern reviewing mind mostly is-to its large profit) of mistakes in general.

§ 2. The quite first edition, with the original plates, will always, I venture to say, bear a high price in the market;³ for its etchings were not only, every line of them, by my own hand, but bitten also (the last of them in my washhand basin at “La Cloche” of Dijon,) by myself, with savage carelessness (I being then, as now, utterly scornful of all sorts of art dependent on blotch, or burr, or any other “process” than that of steady hand and true line):-out of which disdain,

¹ [Cf. note of 1883 to Modern Painters, vol. ii. sec. i. ch. i. § 7 (Vol. IV. p. 37 of this edition).]

² [These passages will be found in the footnotes to this edition: see pp. 41, 63. For other references by Ruskin in later years to “the rabid Protestantism” and “pious insolence” of his early books, see Modern Painters, vol. i. Preface to 1873 ed. (Vol. III. p. 54); notes to 1883 ed. of vol. ii. (Vol. IV. pp. 61, 110, 199); and Sesame and Lilies, Preface to 1871 ed.]

³ [See particulars given in the Bibliographical Note above, p. li.]

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[Version 0.04: March 2008]