u to "Wordsworth's Thanksgiving Ode."

I have no early edition of Wordsworth. In Moxon's, 1844, no such lines
appear in the Thanksgiving Ode, but in the ode dated 1815, and printed
immediately before it, the following lines occur.

"But man is thy most awful instrument
In working out a pure intent."

It is hardly possible to avoid the conclusion that Wordsworth altered
the lines after "Don Juan" was written. I am, with great respect, your
obedient servant,

RALPH THICKNESSE.

JOHN RUSKIN, Esq.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 88: November, 1880.--ED.]

[Footnote 89: "Childe Harold," iv. 79; compare "Adonais," and Sismondi,
vol. i. p. 148.]

[Footnote 90: Adrian the Fourth. Eugenius died in the previous year.]

[Footnote 91: "All the multitudes threw themselves on their knees,
praying mercy in the name of the crosses they bore: the Count of
Blandrata took a cross from the enemies with whom he had served, and
fell at the foot of the throne, praying for mercy to them. All the court
and the witnessing army were in tears--the Emperor alone showed no sign
of emotion. Distrusting his wife's sensibility, he had forbidden her
presence at the ceremony; the Milanese, unable to approach her, threw
towards her windows the crosses they carried, to plead for
them."--Sismondi (French edition), vol. i. p. 378.]

[Footnote 92: The most noble and tender confession is in Allegra's
epitaph, "I shall go to her, but she shall not return to me."]

[Footnote 93: Hypocrisy is too good a word for either Pall Mall or
Trianon, being justly applied (as always in the New Testament), only to
men whose false religion has become earnest, and a part of their being:
so that they compass heaven and earth to make a proselyte. There is no
relation between minds of this order and those of common rogues. Neither
Tartuffe nor Joseph Surface are hypocrites--they are simply impostors:
but many of the most earnest preachers in all existing churches are
hypocrites in the highest; and the Tartuffe-Squiredom and Joseph
Surface-Masterhood of our virtuous England which build churches and pay
priests to keep their peasants and hands peaceable, so that rents and
per cents may be spent, unnoticed, in the debaucheries of the
metropolis, are darker forms of imposture than either heaven or earth
have yet been compassed by; and what they are to end in, heaven and
earth only know. Compare again, "Island," ii. 4, "the prayers of Abel
linked to deeds of Cain," an