622 APPENDIX

I had constructed a style of pen-drawing with shade stippled out of doubled lines, and outline carefully broken for picturesqueness, yet not inelegant, formed chiefly in endeavours to show architecture. Fragments of subjects begun in that year, at Richmond Hill and Windsor, Oxford, Gloucester, and Tewkesbury, are all extremely presentable-the Gloucester tower is even framed in my Oxford schools,¹ and I leave it to them in memory of the year in which I first saw Oxford, and remember the look of its towers against the sunset as we drove down the hill at Iffley. There once existed, and may somewhere yet, a piece of joint diary by Mary and me, supplemented occasionally-which was the greatest of favours and encouragements to us-by a word or two from my father. He added to our account of visiting Christ Church cathedral in charge of a guide-we knew no one in the University-“They only let us half in, and we soon let ourselves wholly out, for they put us into a seat directly under the organ.” Such the exact beginning of my Oxford life. From Gloucester we went on to Hereford, having planned that year an expatriation into North Wales from Shrewsbury after my father had seen his business people there. But, as we were breakfasting at Hereford, came talk of the Welsh hills, being thence visible, and I expressing some torture of hope delayed at the thought of skirting them all the long day to Shrewsbury, my father and mother, looking at each other across the table a little while, at last ordered the horses out with their heads towards Wales.

The rapture of that wonderful morning coming suddenly on me, and of the every moment more wonderful and delicious day, as the Welsh hills rose round me, swelling up at first in long knolls out of Hereford plain, closing into steep downs, lifting themselves soon into masses studded with intermitting shade, then into crag, and at last into mountain moorlands; the streams becoming steep, the falls light, the road narrow among the glens of Plynlimmon, and at evening the marvel and majesty of torrent and defile and meeting of waters looked down on from the little inn at Pont-y-Monach! I suppose I had as much pleasure in that single day as some men have in all their lives.

We spent the Sunday at Pont-y-Monach, the joy of a walk ... (see § 108).

“PROUTESQUE” STYLE

[This passage in the MS. follows on after “Genoa,” at the end of i. § 154 in the text (p. 134), and refers to the author’s earlier continental visits generally.]

For the enjoyment of all alike, I was further prepared by my ignorance. Hitherto having never so much as drawn the form of a single leaf with attention, even in the living tree, far less in sculpture, all carving came nearly alike to me, so only that it was rich. I carved only for “curlie-wurlies and whigmaleeries,”² and was as happy in the fifteenth century as in the tenth. Although already I had begun to draw traceries carefully, and the tabernacle work connected with them, for crockets, bosses, or

¹ [No. 87 in the Rudimentary Series: see Plate XLIII. in Vol. XXI., where in the note (p. 193) “1834” should, it seems, be 1832.]

² [Scott, Rob Roy: see Fiction, Fair and Foul, § 30 (Vol. XXXIV. p. 295).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]