616 APPENDIX

me-and of truths insisted on by me, in all future teaching which bore on minor ornament:-

[The passage is § 251-ibid., p. 184-a passage insisting on the relation of ornamental design to natural forms.]

It is quite out of my power, now, to explain the temper or expectation in which all this and the like of it was set down in these anonymous papers, with the air, and apparently the self-security, of a Daniel come to judgment.¹ I had not the slightest idea of becoming either an architect, a painter, or a critic. One of the most unlucky stupidities and blank places in my mind was precisely in this insouciance of what I would do, or be. Wholly idiotic, it appears to me, as my way of staring at the sea.² I can only guess,-I cannot in the least remember,-that the idea of being a clergyman to please my mother, certainly not definitely yet renounced by me, had taken the form of a vague hope to live like White of Selborne, in England, and, occasionally travelling, take Sunday service in Protestant cantons of Switzerland. But I lived always like a grasshopper from day to day, and finding these notions and feelings in me, and having unlimited trust in myself as far as I went, which every true boy, man, and beast has a right to have, set them down in this dictatorial manner, trusting to what I knew was honest in them for their impression on the reader. Which has indeed been my way, more or less, ever since.

The most interesting and vigorous parts of these essays are their descriptions of the Swiss and Westmorland cottages, and the most curious point about them is that after passing from these to more or less forced and feeble observations of Italian villas and Elizabethan halls, illustrated by drawings mostly filched from Turner vignettes (the Swiss cottages are really from nature and good), the papers close abruptly, as if their business was at its natural end, without a word of allusion in any part of them, or of apology for the want of allusion, to the higher forms of civil and religious architecture.

[The MS. then continues as in the text, i. § 253 (p. 227).]

THE TOUR OF 1841

[This passage follows in the MS. upon ii. § 57 (p. 297).]

I am surprised to find my diary take no more cheerful or dutiful colour, after that morning at Lans-le-bourg,³ but having to leave the Alps as soon as I had found them again perhaps kept me sulky-one of the sulky entries at Rheims may be worth a minute’s notice.

I have not, in recording events at Rome, insisted enough on the really serious study of Michael Angelo which I carried on there, or the state of mind in which it left me. In this matter only, I found the public mind and authority in concord with my own feeling, and assuming that what

¹ [Merchant of Venice, Act iv. sc. 1.]

² [See above, p. 613.]

³ [See above, pp. 296-297.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]