X. CROSSMOUNT 421

191. There was great joy in helping my mother from the door of the Cygne along a quarter of a mile of extempore plank bridge in the streets, and in writing a rhymed letter in description of the lifted lake and swirling Reuss, to little Louise Ellis (Mr. Telford’s niece, at this time one of the happy presences in Widmore), of which a line or two yet remain in my ears, about a market boat moored above the submerged quay-

“Full of mealy potatoes and marrowfat pease,

And honey, and butter, and Simmenthal cheese,

And a poor little calf, not at all at its ease,

Tied by the neck to a box at its knees.

Don’t you agree with me, dear Louise,

It was unjustifiably cruel in

Them to have brought it in all that squeeze

Over the lake from Fluelen?”¹

And so home, that year by Troyes, with my own calf’s mind also little at its ease, under confused squeeze of Alps, clouds, and architecture; yet finding room still in the waist-coat pocket for notes on the external tracery of St. Urbain, which fixed that church for me as the highest type of Gothic construction,² and took me off all Italian models for the next four years. The abstraction, however, though St. Urbain began it, was not altogether that Saint’s fault.

192. The press notices of my second volume had been either cautious or complimentary,-none, to the best of my memory, contemptuous.³ My friends took much pleasure in it, and the estimate formed of it in the old Scott and John Murray circle was shown by Lockhart’s asking me that winter to review Lord Lindsay in the Quarterly.⁴ I was shy of doing this, being well aware that Lord Lindsay knew much more about Italian painting than I did; but

¹ [The rhyming letter is quoted also in Ruskin’s Notes on his Drawings by Turner: see Vol. XIII. p. 494.]

² [Compare Vol. VIII. p. 259, and Vol. XXIII. p. 106.]

³ [For extracts from various reviews, see Vol. IV. pp. xli.-xliii. The Athenæum, however, was still contemptuous.]

⁴ [For Ruskin’s review of Lord Lindsay’s Sketches of the History of Christian Art, see Vol. XII. pp. 169-248.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]