610 APPENDIX

OXFORD STUDIES

[This passage in the MS. follows i. § 227 (p. 200), where Ruskin says that a Oxford he did six hours’ work in the day, “constantly and unflinchingly given.”]

Had it been given to elementary work, and had my tutors forbidden me to read for honours, and forced me to learn my grammar thoroughly, some practical trigonometry, and some English history, I should have been-so far as any of us can say what we should have been-healthfully and usefully employed, not to say happily, all those years. As it was, I learned my Herodotus and Thucydides history fairly well-got to know the look of a good many Greek and Latin words, and some sense of their power and meaning, never clearly of their construction-learned enough of conic sections to make me want to know more, in vain-but, alas, lost the spring and joy of my own especial faculties, getting no useful lessons in drawing, and feeling ill at ease in conscience at my mineralogy. I learned four dialogues of Plato-of Theology, the Thirty-nine Articles;-of myself-or the world I was to live in-nothing.

[This next passage in the MS. follows i. § 237 of the text (p. 211), where Ruskin describes his good knowledge of Thucydides.]

Nor was my Herodotus, though I never mastered his dialect, ill known by the end of my second year, and some extremely useful study got through in the Clouds, Knights, and Frogs: the Birds beat me,-but I owe more of the general tone and form of my political thoughts to Aristophanes than to any other writer, living or dead.

It is extremely curious to me to find that from my earliest years, whatever stuff I might be writing myself, or whatever nonsense I might be thinking, I never liked a bad book-and even began very early indeed to rank the good ones at their true value. I sometimes disliked, or did not value, a good one-yet never without some right cause. Both Virgil and Milton were too rhetorical and parasitical for me; Sophocles I found dismal, and in subject disgusting, Tacitus too hard, Terence dull and stupid beyond patience;-but I loved my Plato from the first line I read-knew my Ethics for what they were worth, (which is not much) and detested with all my heart and wit the accursed and rascally Rhetoric,¹-which my being compelled to work at gave me a mortal contempt for the whole University system, which little helped my Oxford labours in general. The quantity of that work which my being able already so to judge of all these books meant, must have been considerable, and partly accounts for my having no spare energy for the pursuit of such English history as the buildings of Oxford and its within-walk district ought to have provoked me, and pleaded with me, to know. If any of my tutors had only had the sense to stop off the books I did not like, see that I mastered the dialects

¹ [Compare Vol. I. p. xxxv., and Vol. VI. p. 484.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]