rial fires the ineffable tenderness of the real man
emerging, with his passionate appeal to justice and baffled desire for
truth. To those who could not follow the wanderings of the wearied brain
it was nothing but a horrible or a grotesque nightmare. Some, in those
trials, learnt as they could not otherwise have learnt to know him, and
to love him as never before.

There were many periods of health, or comparative health, even in those
years. While convalescent from the illness of 1885 he continued
"Praeterita" and "Dilecta," the series of notes and letters illustrating
his life. In connection with early reminiscences, he amused himself by
reproducing his favourite old nursery book, "Dame Wiggins of Lee." He
edited the works of one or two friends, wrote occasionally to
newspapers--notably on books and reading, to the _Pall Mall Gazette_, in
the "Symposium" on the best hundred books. He continued his arrangements
for the Museum, and held an exhibition (June, 1886) of the drawings made
under his direction for the Guild.

He was already drifting into another illness when he sent the famous
reply to an appeal for help to pay off the debt on a chapel at Richmond.
The letter is often misquoted for the sake of raising a laugh, so that
it is not out of place to reprint it as a specimen of the more vehement
expressions of this period. The reader of his life must surely see,
through the violence of the wording, a perfectly consistent and
reasonable expression of Mr. Ruskin's views:--

"BRANTWOOD, CONISTON, LANCASHIRE.

"_May 19th_, 1886.

"SIR,

"I am scornfully amused at your appeal to me, of all people in the world
the precisely least likely to give you a farthing! My first word to all
men and boys who care to hear me is 'Don't get into debt. Starve and go
to heaven--but don't borrow. Try first begging,--I don't mind, if it's
really needful, stealing! But don't buy things you can't pay for!'

"And of all manner of debtors, pious people building churches they can't
pay for are the most detestable nonsense to me. Can't you preach and
pray behind the hedges--or in a sandpit--or a coal-hole--first?

"And of all manner of churches thus idiotically built iron churches are
the damnablest to me.

"And of all the sects of believers in any ruling spirit--Hindoos, Turks,
Feather Idolaters, and Mumbo Jumbo, Log and Fire worshippers, who want
churches, your modern English Evangelical sect is the most absurd, and
entirely objecti