Note 99 — LETTERS ON ART.

In a letter to Mr. Norton written in the same year as this one to the Literary Gazette, Mr. Ruskin thus speaks of the value of these plates: “Even those who know most of art may at first look be disappointed with the Liber Studiorum. For the nobleness of these designs is not more in what is done than in what is not done in them. Every touch in these plates is related to every other, and has no permission of withdrawn, monastic virtue, but is only good in its connection with the rest, and in that connection infinitely and inimitably good. The showing how each of these designs is connected by all manner of strange intellectual chords and nerves with the pathos and history of this old English country of ours, and with the history of European mind from earliest mythology down to modern rationalism and irrationalism—all this was what I meant to try and show in my closing work; but long before that closing I felt it to be impossible.”—Extract from a letter of Mr. Ruskin, 1858, quoted in the “List of Turner Drawings, etc.,” already mentioned, p. 5.