Page:Pen And Pencil Sketches - Volume I.djvu/156

102 too bluntly said, ought the friends of the noble artist to feel that I am unkind. It is because I know his real power more deeply than any of the admirers who give him indiscriminate applause, that I think it right distinctly to mark the causes which prevented his reaching heights they did not conceive, and ended by placing one more tablet in the street of tombs, which the passionate folly and uninstructed confusion of modern English society prolong with dark perspective above the graves of its youth.

“ I am, dear Marks, always very faithfully yours,

“J. Ruskin.”

Here are the two letters referred to previously : —

“15, N.W., January 18, 1876.

“ — I sent your manuscript to the Times early this morning, so perhaps we may see it in print to-morrow.

“ If I also may speak ‘the whole truth,’ I would say that I read your notes with a feeling of disap- pointment. I had hoped that he who praised Frere so highly, finding in him ‘the grace of Reynolds and the purity of Angelico’ (I quote from memory), and who told us that ‘if we are now to do any- thing great, good, or religious, it must be got out of our own little island, railroads and all,’ — I had