414 PRÆTERITA-II

accomplished its purpose. It is usually read only for its pretty passages; its theory of beauty is scarcely ever noticed,-its praise of Tintoret has never obtained the purchase of any good example of him for the National Gallery.¹ But I permit myself-perhaps with vain complacency-the thought that I have had considerable share in the movement which led to the useful work of the Arundel Society in Italy, and to the enlargement of the National collection by its now valuable series of fourteenth-century religious paintings.

The style of the book was formed on a new model, given me by Osborne Gordon. I was old enough now to feel that neither Johnsonian balance nor Byronic alliteration were ultimate virtues in English prose; and I had been reading with care, on Gordon’s counsel, both for its arguments and its English, Richard Hooker’s Ecclesiastical Polity.² I had always a trick of imitating, more or less, the last book I had read with admiration; and it farther seemed to me that for the purposes of argument, (and my own theme was, according to my notion, to be argued out invincibly,) Hooker’s English was the perfectest existing model. At all events, I did the best I then knew how, leaving no passage till I had put as much thought into it as it could be made to carry, and chosen the words with the utmost precision and tune I could give them.

For the first time in my life, when I had finished the last sentence, I was really tired. In too long readings at Oxford I got stupid and sleepy, but not fatigued: now, however, I felt distinctly that my head could do no more; and with much satisfied thankfulness, after the revise of the last sheet was sent to printer, found myself on the bows of the little steamer, watching their magical division of the green waves between Dover and Calais.

185. Little steamers they all were, then; nor in the least well appointed, nor aspiring to any pride of shape or

¹ [A reproach partially removed in 1890 by the purchase of Lord Darnley’s “Origin of the Milky Way” (No. 1313).]

² [For other references by Ruskin to his debt to Hooker, see Vol. IV. p. 334 n., Vol. XVIII. p. 32, and above, p. 14.]

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