lxxviii INTRODUCTION

felt yesterday in noticing, as far as I recollect for the first time, that ‘Solomon’ meant peaceable. How beautifully is this connected with ‘The wisdom that cometh from above is first pure, then peaceable.’¹ I have hitherto endeavoured too much to learn the Bible by heart (more, I fear, from vanity than any other feeling) instead of diving into it as I read. I always begin things too eagerly and carelessly, but have prayed I may go on with this.”

Notes on the Book of Genesis follow. Ruskin’s studies and writings were manifold, as this volume sufficiently shows; but behind them all there was one constant background-an almost daily study of the Bible.

IV

In the last Part of this volume is printed a piece, hitherto unpublished, which is short but pregnant. This is the first, and a portion of the second, of three Letters which Ruskin wrote in 1852, intending to send them to the Times, on Political Affairs. The first letter is on Principles of Taxation; the second (of which only an incomplete draft has been found), on Principles of Representation; the third was to have been on Principles of Education. Of this the MS. has not been found; much of it seems to have been utilised by Ruskin in the Notes on Education printed by him as Appendix 7 to the third volume of The Stones of Venice. The passages here printed, and the letters from Ruskin to his father in which he further explained his ideas and the importance he attached to them, are of considerable interest in connexion with the development of his political views.

We have traced already some of the occasions and circumstances in which Ruskin had been led to devote thought to social, economic, and political matters. More and more he was becoming convinced that there was something rotten in the state of political society. He was a Republican as against institutions or laws which oppressed the poor; and a Conservative as against theories and reforms which were based on doctrines of liberty and equality. Something must also be allowed for his natural affection for the side of the minority. This is a view he put forward himself in a letter to his father:-

“Sunday, 16th November [1851].-In Galignani yesterday we had some very wonderful additional accounts of Kossuth, and the address to him by the democrats, signed by a whole man’s worth of tailors and a whole bevy of ‘Proscrits,’ with his polite answer thereto,

¹ James iii. 17.

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