I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL 17

I have kind invitations enough to visit America, I could not, even for a couple of months, live in a country so miserable as to possess no castles.

7. Nevertheless, having formed my notion of kinghood chiefly from the FitzJames of the Lady of the Lake, and of noblesse from the Douglas there, and the Douglas in Marmion, a painful wonder soon arose in my child-mind, why the castles should now be always empty. Tantallon was there; but no Archibald of Angus:-Stirling, but no Knight of Snowdoun. The galleries and gardens of England were beautiful to see-but his Lordship and her Ladyship were always in town, said the housekeepers and gardeners. Deep yearning took hold of me for a kind of “Restoration,” which I began slowly to feel that Charles the Second had not altogether effected, though I always wore a gilded oak-apple very piously in my button-hole on the 29th of May. It seemed to me that Charles the Second’s Restoration had been, as compared with the Restoration I wanted, much as that gilded oak-apple to a real apple. And as I grew wiser, the desire for sweet pippins instead of bitter ones, and Living Kings instead of dead ones, appeared to me rational as well as romantic; and gradually it has become the main purpose of my life to grow pippins, and its chief hope, to see Kings.*

8. I have never been able to trace these prejudices to any royalty of descent: of my father’s ancestors I know nothing,¹ nor of my mother’s more than that my maternal grandmother was the landlady of the Old King’s Head in Market Street, Croydon; and I wish she were alive again, and I could paint her Simone Memmi’s King’s Head,² for a sign.

* The St. George’s Company was founded for the promotion of agricultural instead of town life: and my only hope of prosperity for England, or any other country, in whatever life they lead, is in their discovering and obeying men capable of Kinghood.

¹ [For further particulars, traced after this passage appeared, see the Introduction, pp. lviii.-lxi.; and below, pp. 601-604.)]

² [The head of the Emperor in the fresco in the “Spanish Chapel,” at S. Maria Novella, Florence: see Ruskin’s drawing in Vol. XXIII. (p. 458), and compare Fors, Letter 46 (Vol. XXVIII. pp. 169, 170).]

XXXV. B

[Version 0.04: March 2008]