xlii INTRODUCTION

and I have among my artist-friends many who would I believe be glad to have the book and cannot buy it-so that my presentation copies are nearly exhausted: but if your Review don’t, I will send you one-only then send me back the sheets you have, that I may get them bound for somebody else-I hope they sent you the plates also, or the text would be of little use to you.

I shall be delighted to have a brush with the Edinburgh: and you may tell the Editor so-with my compliments. I will keep a corner of Appendix open for him in the second volume.¹

Yours most truly,

J. RUSKIN.

A later review annoyed Ruskin even more:-

“Don’t send me any more critiques,” he writes to his father (Venice, Feb. 27, 1852). “I did not use to be sensitive to criticism. I used to be very angry when I was taxed with being so. But I am so now-partly from being nervous, partly because my works cost me more labour. I could sit down and write a poem, with a good deal of nonsense in it, in a couple of hours; if a reviewer said it was nonsense, I felt he had a right to his opinion and did not care. But when I work over a volume for two years, and weigh every word in it, and a dim-brained rascal like this of the Guardian² walks up to me and tells me ‘half of my statements are diametrically opposite to the others,’ simply because the poor long-eared brute cannot see that a thistle has two sides, it does worry me considerably, and makes me very angry, and yet depresses me at the same time. Miss Edgeworth says nothing will satisfy an author but ‘large draughts of unqualified praise.’ I believe I am getting to be a good deal of this temper: at all events don’t send me any more reviews. I have quite enough to spoil my temper in my work.”

In a postscript he returns to the charge:-

“Who is the editor of this Guardian? I thought I knew him, and that he was a man of sense. Please ask Smith. I am like Imogen, ‘spirited with a fool, frighted, and angered worse.’ That a man should be able to spell, and not see the difference between religion bettering art, and art bettering religion, and then that the blockhead should give himself airs to me!”

¹ This, however, was not done.

² The Guardian, February 18, 1852; a review of The Stones of Venice, vol. i., and the Examples of Venetian Architecture, parts 1-3. The reviewer, after noticing what he alleged to be contradictions in Ruskin’s argument on the connection of art and religion, proceeded to attack “the plates, which to us at least are the least interesting parts of Mr. Ruskin’s book. We have also been very much disappointed with the three first

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