APPENDIX 611

of those I did, and taken two or three summer afternoon walks with me to Godstow and Abingdon, telling me what the places meant, I count that it would have saved me good seven years of strong life, spent in finding out for myself what I might have been told in a summer term.

[The following passage comes in the MS. at the end of what is i. § 137 in the text (p. 118). Incidents related in it were ultimately embodied in i. § 225 and ii. § 155 (pp. 198, 385).]

I need not carry farther the reminiscences of that journey of 1833 to explain the apathy with which I saw the small sublimities and lowly beauties of the neighbourhood of Oxford, after these strong excitements in other directions-but I must again complain with sad astonishment that the University as a historical body, having a youth cast into their hands for educational treatment with his head full of mountains and cathedrals, never required of him a single exercise in map or section drawing, and never taught him either the tradition of a saint or the dynamics of a buttress.

Something was done for me by Mr. Parker, and the Architectural Society,¹ and I got two telling lessons from Henry Acland and Charles Newton. I was one day drawing the cathedral spire from the nearest possible point, the angle of the cloister quadrangle, when Henry, passing, and pausing to observe me a while, began with ironical gravity to express astonishment and sorrow. He had always before, though with the same tone of gentle irony, put himself in the position of a pupil, and pretended to learn from my drawing “how everything was to be done.” On this occasion, with extreme sadness in his countenance, he expressed his disappointment in his master. “But, Ruskin, how many arches do you count in the cornice brackets?” I had to count them on his question. “Eight,” I answered-or whatever the number was, I forget now. “And how many have you got in your drawing?” There were but five! I explained, without much humiliation of myself, that it would have been impossible to draw them with the clearness and delightfulness of the Ruskin manner, unless I had made them a little larger than they were in reality, and that my drawing really gave the effect of the spire better than a more literal one would. But Henry Acland was not to be comforted, nor, afterwards, my once awakened conscience to be put to rest. I did not immediately reform my style-but the lesson told, and the day came when I counted not only the arches in a cornice but the coils in a cable moulding, and whatever the art of my drawing might be, its arithmetic at least was trustworthy.

From Charles Newton, the lesson came less consciously, in the form of a request, that I would draw a Norman door for him, on which he was going to read a paper to the Architectural Society. When I got to work on it, he had to point out to me that my black dots and Proutesque breaks were no manner of use to him, and that I must be content to draw steady lines in their exact place and proportion. I fulfilled his directions with more difficulty than I had expected-and produced the first architectural

¹ [See in the text i. § 225 (p. 198).]

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