416 PRÆTERITA-II

were literally the only pieces that came up to my mark; ordinary minsters and palaces, however they might set themselves up for sublime, usually hurt me by some manner of disproportion or pretence; and my best joys were in small pieces of provincial building, full of character, and naturally graceful and right in their given manner. In this kind the little wooden belfry of Evreux, of which Prout’s drawing is photographed at page 42 of my “Memoir,”* is consummate; but the Calais one, though of far later and commoner style, is also matchless, far or near, in that rude way, and has been a perpetual delight and lesson to me. Prout has a little idealized it in the distance of the drawing of Calais Harbour, page 40 in the same book;¹ I never tried to draw it myself, the good of it being not in any sculpturesque detail, but in the complex placing of its plain, square-cut props and ties, taking some pretence of pinnacle on them, and being really as structurally useful, though by their linked circletting instead of their weight. There was never time in the happy afternoon to do this carefully enough, though I got a colour-note once of the church-spire, loved in a deeper way, (Modern Painters, Vol. IV., Chap. I.,²) but the belfry beat me. After all, the chief charm of it was in being seen from my bedroom at Dessein’s,³ and putting me to sleep and waking me with its chimes.

187. Calais is properly a Flemish, not French town (of course the present town is all, except belfry and church,

* Printed by the Fine Art Society, 1880.⁴

¹ [Vol. XIV. p. 409 (Plate XI.), where Ruskin’s drawing (1842) of the belfry is also given (Plate XII.): the present drawing (Plate XXX.) is of earlier date (1835), and there are other sketches in existence of the same subject. Ruskin here means, therefore, that he “never tried” to make a finished and detailed drawing of the belfry.]

² [See in this edition Vol. VI. p. 11.]

³ [For other references to this hostelry, see Vol. II. p. 398, and Vol. XII. p. 381.]

⁴ [The “Memoir” is the Notes on Prout and Hunt: see in this edition Vol. XIV. p. 410 (Plate XIII.).]

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