576 DILECTA

the plain practical truth of all you tell us. I cannot bear to hear people talk and write as they do of your style, and your being the greatest master of it, etc., while they sneer at the matter, etc. Nothing lowers the present generation of what are called clever men more to me than this” (nay, is not their abuse of Carlyle’s manner worse than their praise of mine?). “I am rather thankful, even, that my best friends here do not belong to this class, being mostly pilots, sea captains, boat-builders, fishermen, and the like.

“I shall, in a day or two, be with my mother at Henley-on-Thames, and if I learn anything more from her about Turner, will let you know. She is now eighty-four, but writes a better letter, in a finer hand, without glasses, than I can with them.”

10. “6, MOIRA PLACE, SOUTHAMPTON,

“June 25th, 1884.

“DEAR MR. RUSKIN,-I have before me the engraving by Wilmore of the Téméraire. I think it was Stanfield who told me that the rigging of the ship in this engraving was trimmed up and generally made intelligible to the engraver by some mechanical marine artist or other. I am not sure now who, but think it was Duncan; whether or no, the rigging is certainly not as Turner painted it; while the black funnel of the tug in the engraving is placed abaft her mast or flagpole, instead of before it, as in Turner’s picture; his first, strong, almost prophetic idea of smoke, soot, iron, and steam, coming to the front in all naval matters, being thus changed and, I venture to think, weakened by this alteration. You most truly told us years ago that ‘Take it all in all, a ship of the line is the most honourable thing that man, as a gregarious animal, has ever produced.’¹ I shall not therefore hesitate to ask you to put on your best spectacles and look for a moment at the enclosed photograph, which I have had taken for you from a model of the Téméraire, which we have here now in a sort of museum. The model is nearly three feet long, and belonged to an old naval man; it was made years ago by the French prisoners in the hulks at Portsmouth out of their beef-bones! Even if we were at war with France, and had the men and ships likely to do it, it would be impossible to catch any prisoners now who could make such a ship as this out of anything, much less of beef-bones; and as I foresee that this lovely little ship must soon, in the nature of things, pass away (some unfeeling brute has already robbed her of all her boats), and that there will be no one living able to restore a rope or spar rightly once they are broken or displaced in her, I felt it almost a duty to have this record taken and to send you a copy of it. I focussed the camera myself, but there is, unavoidably, some exaggeration of the length of her jibboom and flying-jibboom. These spars, however, in old ships really measured, together with the bowsprit, nearly the length of the foremast from deck to truck. In fact, the bowsprit, with its spritsail and spritsail-topsailyards, formed a sort of fourth mast.

11. “I have just returned from a visit to my dear old mother at Henley, and she told me of how Turner came up to our house one evening

¹ [See Harbours of England, Vol. XIII. p. 28.]

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