ted to the Guild
work,--even his own private affairs and confessions, whatever they
risked,--he felt that this too must out; in order that his supporters
might judge of his conduct and that nothing affecting the enterprise
might be kept back. And so, at Christmas, he sent the correspondence to
his printers.

Years afterwards, by the intervention of friends, this breach was
healed: but what suffering it cost can be learnt from the sequel. To
Ruskin it was the beginning of the end. His Aberdeen correspondent asked
just then for the usual Christmas message to the Bible class: and
instead of the cheery words of bygone years, received the couplet from
Horace:

"Inter spem curamque, timores inter et iras,
_Omnem_ crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum."

"Amid hope and sorrow, amid fear and wrath, believe
_every_ day that has dawned on thee to be thy last."

From Oxford, early in January, 1878, he went on a visit to Windsor
Castle, whence he wrote: "I came to see Prince Leopold, who has been a
prisoner to his sofa lately, but I trust he is better; he is very bright
and gentle under severe and almost continual pain." No less gentle, in
spite of the severe justice he was inflicting upon himself even more
than upon his friend, was the author of "Fors," as the letters of the
time to his invalid neighbour in "Hortus Inclusus" show. How ready to
own himself in the wrong,--at that very moment when he was being pointed
at as the most obstinate and egotistic of men--how placable he really
was and open to rebuke, he showed, when, from Windsor, he went to
Hawarden. Nearly three years before he had written roughly of Mr.
Gladstone; as a Conservative, he was not predisposed in favour of the
leader of the party to whom he attributed most of the evils he was
combating. Mr. Gladstone and he had often met, and by no means agreed
together in conversation. But this visit convinced him that he had
misjudged Mr. Gladstone; and he promptly made the fullest apology in the
current number of "Fors," saying that he had written under a complete
misconception of his character. In reprinting the old pages he not only
cancelled the offending passage, but he left the place blank, with a
note in the middle of it, as "a memorial of rash judgment."

He went slowly northward, seeking rest at Ingleton; whence he wrote,
January 17:--"I've got nothing done all the time I've been away but a
few mathematical figures [crystallography, no doubt, f