Page:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu/901

Rh attended the trial of the earl of Strafford, and took shorthand notes of the proceedings. He was much employed as a messenger between the king and the parliament, and from the 11th of April 1644 till the 9th of March 1647 was licenser of pamphlets. When the new model army was formed he was appointed secretary to the parliamentary general, Sir Thomas Fairfax. He was present at the battle of Naseby, of which he wrote an account. When Fairfax, who was offended by the execution of the king, resigned his command, Rushworth was for a short time secretary to Cromwell. He was afterwards employed by the council of state and during the protectorate, and sat in Cromwell's parliament for Berwick. When Richard Cromwell resigned the protectorate, Rushworth was employed by the Rump after it had been re-established by Monk. He made his peace with the government of Charles II., and though he was threatened with trial as a regicide he was not seriously molested. During the reign of Charles II. he continued to act as agent for the town of Berwick, and he sat for it in parliament. He was also for a time agent for Massachusetts, but the colony complained that it received no advantage from his services. During the last years of his life he fell into poverty, and from 1684 till his death on the 12th of May 1690 he was a resident in the King's Bench prison. At this time he had destroyed his memory by over-indulgence in drink. The collection of papers which he made was published in eight volumes folio between 1659 and 1701. The volumes from the fourth onwards appeared after his death. The first, which appeared with a dedication to Richard Cromwell was recalled and the dedication was suppressed.

RUSKIN, JOHN (1819-1900), English writer and critic, was born in London, at Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, on the 8th of February 1819, being the only child of John James Ruskin and Margaret Cox. They were Scots, first cousins, the grandchildren of a certain John Ruskin of Edinburgh (1732-1780). In Praeterita the author professes small knowledge of his ancestry. But the memoirs published on the authority of the family trace their descent to the Adairs and Agnews of Galloway. In this family tree are men famous in arms and in the public service: Sir Andrew Agnew of Lochnaw, Admiral Sir John Ross, Field-Marshal Sir Hew Dalrymple Ross, Dr John Adair, in whose arms Wolfe died at Quebec, and the Rev. W. Tweddale of Glenluce, to whom the original Covenant, now in the Glasgow Museum, had been confided. The name Ruskin is said to be a variant of Erskine, or Roskeen, or Rogerkin, and even Roughskin. It is more probably Rusking, an Anglian family, which passed northwards and became Ruskyn, Rusken and Ruskin.

John Ruskin, the author's grandfather, a handsome lad of twenty, ran away with Catherine Tweddale, daughter of the Covenanting minister and of Catherine Adair, then a beautiful girl of sixteen. He settled in Edinburgh and engaged in the wine trade, lived liberally in the cultivated society of the city, lost his health and his fortime, and' ended his days in debt. His son, John James Ruskin (1785-1864), father of the author, was sent to the High School at Edinburgh under Dr A. Adam, received a sound classical education, and was well advised by his friend Dr Thomas Brown, the eminent meta physician. When of age, John James was sent to London to enter the wine trade. There, in ISOQ, he founded the sherry business of Ruskin, Telford & Domecq; Domecq being proprietor of a famous vineyard in Spain, Telford contributing the capital of the irm, and Ruskin having sole control of the business. John James Ruskin, a typical Scot, of remarkable energy, probity and foresight, built up a great business, paid off his father's debts, formed near London a most hospitable and cultured home, where he maintained his taste for literature and art, and lived and died, as his son proudly wrote upon his tomb, “ an entirely honest merchant.” He was also a man of strong brain, generous nature and iine taste. After a delay of nine years, having at last obtained an adequate income, he married his cousin, Margaret Cox, who had already lived for eighteen years with his mother, the widow of John Ruskin of Edinburgh. When this marriage of the two cousins, who had known each other all their lives, took place in 1818, neither of them was young. John James was thirty-three and Margaret was thirty-seven. In the following year (8th February 1819) their only child, John, was born in Hunter Street, London.

Margaret Ruskin, the author's mother, was a handsome, strong, stern, able, devoted woman of the old Puritan school, Calvinist in religion, unsparing of herself and others, rigid in her ideas of duty, proud, reserved and ungracious. She was the daughter of Captain Cox, of Yarmouth, master mariner in the herring fishery, who died young; whereupon his widow maintained herself as landlady of the King's Head Inn at Croydon. Her younger daughter married Mr Richardson, a baker, of Croydon; the elder, Margaret, married John James Ruskin. Jessie, a sister of John James, married Peter Richardson, a tanner, of Perth, so that the author had cousins of two Richardson families, unconnected with each other. In his own memoirs he speaks much more of these than of any Ruskins, Tweddales, Adairs or Agnews. The child was brought up under a rigid system of nursing, physical, moral and intellectual; kept without toys, not seldom whipped, watched day and night, but trained from infancy in music, drawing, reading aloud and observation of natural objects. When he was four the family removed to a house on Herne Hill, then a country village, with a garden and rural surroundings. The father, who made long tours on business, took his wife, child and nurse year after year across England as far as Cumberland and Scotland, visiting towns, cathedrals, castles, colleges, parks, mountains and lakes. At five the child was taken to Keswick; at six to Paris, Brussels and Waterloo; at seven to Perthshire. At fourteen he was taken through Flanders, along the Rhine, and through the Black Forest to Switzerland, where he first imbibed his dominant passion for the Alps. His youth was largely passed in systematic travelling in search of everything beautiful in nature or in art. And to one so precocious, stimulated by a parent of much culture, ample means and great ambition, this resulted in an almost unexampled aesthetic education. In childhood also he began a systematic practice of composition, both in prose and verse. His mother trained him in reading the Bible, of which he read through every chapter of every book year by year; and to this study he justly attributes his early command of language and his pure sense of style. His father read to him Shakespeare, Scott, Don Quixote, Pope and Byron, and most of the great English classics; and his attention was especially turned to the formation of sentences and to the rhythm of prose. He began to compose both in prose and verse as soon as he had learned to read and write, both of which arts he taught himself by the eye.

His first letter is dated 1823, when he was only four. In it he corrects his aunt, who had put up the wooden pillars of his Waterloo bridge “ upside down.” At five he was a bookworm. At seven he began a work in four volumes, with “ copper-plates printed and composed by a little boy, and also drawn.” His first poem, correct in rhyme and form, was written before he was seven. At nine he began “ Eudosia, a poem of the Universe.” From that year until his Newdigate Prize, at the age of twenty, he wrote enormous quantities of verse, and began dramas, romances and imitations of Byron, Pope, Scott and Shelley. What remain of these effusions have no special quality except good sense, refined feeling, accuracy of phrase, and a curious correctness of accent and rhythm. Of true poetry in the higher sense there is hardly a single line.

His schooling was irregular and not successful. At the age of eleven he was taught Latin and Greek by Dr Andrews, a scholar of Glasgow University. About the same time he had lessons in drawing and in oil painting from Runciman. French and Euclid were taught by Rowbotham. At fifteen he was sent for two years to the day-school of the Rev. T. Dale of Peckham, and at seventeen he attended some courses in