Page:Dictionary of National Biography. Sup. Vol III (1901).djvu/319

 Waddesdon Bequest). He also bequeathed to the museum library fifteen manuscripts, mostly of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, richly illuminated and on vellum (Addit. MSS. 35310-24). By far the finest of these is a Latin breviary (Addit. MS. 35311), a beautiful example of early fifteenth-century French work.

On 7 June 1865 Rothschild married his cousin Evelina, daughter of Baron [q. v.] Upon her death, without issue, on 4 Dec. 1866, he erected and endowed as a memorial to her the Evelina Hospital for Children in the Southwark Bridge Road.

 RUNDLE, ELIZABETH (1828–1896), author. [See .]  RUSKIN, JOHN (1819–1900), author, artist, and social reformer, was the only child of John James Ruskin (b. 1785), who was the son of a calico merchant in Edinburgh, and Margaret Cox (b. 1781), his wife, the daughter of a skipper in the herring fishery. They were first cousins, and married in 1818. They lived at 54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, London, in which house (marked with a tablet by the Society of Arts, 1900) John Ruskin was born on 8 Feb. 1819. The character of his parents and tenor of his home life were the chief formative forces in Ruskin's education. As a boy he was educated by his mother, and when he went into residence at Oxford she went also, taking lodgings in the High Street, where her husband always joined her from Saturday to Monday. Except during a portion of his short married life, Ruskin lived constantly with his parents; he rarely travelled abroad except in their company, and whenever they were separated daily letters were exchanged. His father died in 1864; his mother in 1871. They are buried in the churchyard of Shirley, Kent. The inscriptions on the monument (designed by Ruskin) state that John James Ruskin 'was an entirely honest merchant, and his memory is, to all who keep it, dear and helpful. His son, whom he loved to the uttermost and taught to speak truth, says this of him.' 'Beside my father's body I have laid my mother's. Nor was dearer earth ever returned to earth, nor purer life recorded in heaven.' A further monument to his mother was the restoration of a spring of water between Croydon and Epsom, and the endowment of a well. A tablet here erected bears the inscription 'In obedience to the Giver of Life, of the brooks and fruits that feed it, of the peace that ends it, may this well be kept sacred for the service of men, flocks, and flowers, and be by kindness called Margaret's Well.'

'I have seen my mother travel,' says Ruskin, 'from sunrise to sunset on a summer's day without once leaning back in the carriage.' She maintained this unbending attitude in the education of her son. An evangelical puritan of the strictest sect, she held strong notions on the sinfulness even of toys, and in after years it is said that the pictures in her husband's house were turned with their faces to the wall on Sunday. With no playfellows, and no toys beyond a single box of bricks, the child's faculties were concentrated from his earliest years on the observation of nature and inanimate things. He used to spend hours, he says, in contemplating the colours of the nursery carpet. When he was four the Ruskins removed from Bloomsbury to Herne Hill (No. 28). The garden now took the place of the carpet. After morning lessons he was his own master. His mother would often be gardening beside him, but he had his own little affairs to see to, 'the ants' nest to watch or a sociable bird or two to make friends with.' The gifts of expression which were to enable him to show to others the loveliness he discerned owed their first cultivation to his mother's daily readings in the Bible 'the one essential part,' he says, 'of all my education.' They read alternate verses, she ' watching every intonation, allowing not so much as a syllable to be missed or misplaced.' She began with the first chapter of Genesis and went straight through to the last verse of the Apocalypse, and began again at Genesis the next day. Ruskin had also to learn the whole of 'the fine old Scottish paraphrases.' To this daily discipline, continued until he went up to Oxford, he attributed the cultivation of his ear and his sense of style.

By his father the boy was initiated in secular literature (especially Scott's novels and Pope's 'Homer') and in art. John James Ruskin had settled in London in 1807, and two years later entered into partnership as a wine-merchant under the title of Ruskin, Telford, & Domecq 'Domecq contributing the sherry, Telford the capital, and Ruskin the brains.' He combined with much shrewdness in business a genuine love of literature and a strong vein of romantic