X. CROSSMOUNT 419

like the figures on a Chinese teacup, he grew restive, Farther, all the fine writing and polite éclat of Modern Painters had never reconciled him to my total resignation of the art of poetry; and beyond this, he entirely, and with acute sense of loss to himself, doubted and deplored my now constant habit of making little patches and scratches of the sections and fractions of things in a notebook which used to live in my waistcoat pocket, instead of the former Proutesque or Robertsian outline of grand buildings and sublime scenes. And I was the more viciously stubborn in taking my own way, just because everybody was with him in these opinions; and I was more and more persuaded every day, that everybody was always wrong.

Often in my other books,-and now, once for all, and finally here,-I have to pray my readers to note that this continually increasing arrogance was not founded on vanity in me, but on sorrow. There is a vast difference-there is all the difference-between the vanity of displaying one’s own faculties, and the grief that other people do not use their own. Vanity would have led me to continue writing and drawing what every one praised; and disciplining my own already practised hand into finer dexterities. But I had no thought but of learning more, and teaching what truth I knew,-assuredly then, and ever since, for the student’s sake, not my own fame’s; however sensitive I may be to the fame, also, afterwards.

189. Meantime, my father and I did not get on well in Italy at all, and one of the worst, wasp-barbed, most tingling pangs of my memory is yet of a sunny afternoon at Pisa, when, just as we were driving past my pet La Spina chapel, my father, waking out of a reverie, asked me suddenly, “John, what shall I give the coachman?” Whereupon, I, instead of telling him what he asked me, as I ought to have done with much complacency at being referred to on the matter, took upon me with impatience to reprove, and lament over, my father’s hardness of heart, in thinking at that moment of sublunary affairs. And the

[Version 0.04: March 2008]