MIL BUSKIN AND SCOTTISH FRIENDS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 8986, 25 February 1888, Page 2 (Supplement)

MIL BUSKIN AND SCOTTISH FRIENDS.

The new chapter of " Prseterita," in concluding the second volume, completes the story of Mr. Ruskin's earlier life by some reminiscences of a few of his friends. First among these he refers to Lady Trevelyan (wife of Sir Walter) —"a monitress friend in whom I wholly trusted dear for herself, but dear also as " having made known to me the best and truest friend of all my life ; best for me, because he was of my father's race, and native town ; truest, because he knew always how to help us both, and never made any mistakes in doing so." This friend was Dr. John Brown (author of " Rab and His Friends"), to whom many references will be found in Mr. Ruskin's recently " Hortuslnclusus,"and some also fn For.? Claris/era.

Dr. Brown's life, says Mr. Ruskin, was "generously sad, as the noblest Scottish lives are alwaysand the relection leads him to think of Carlyle, a conversation with whom, though belonging to a later date (1574), is here recorded. Carlyle was talking of the old Edinburgh schoolmaster's funeral. The boys, Carlyle among them, collected in a group to see the coffin pass : " the sound of the boys' wail is in my ears yet," he said. There was more talk of Carlyle's early days and sorrows, and then " we fell away upon Mill's essay on the substitution of patriotism for religion : — " Actually the most paltry rag" (Carlyle called it) — a chain of vituperative contempt too fast to note—" it has fallen to my lot to come in with. Among my acquaintance I have not seen a person talking of a thing he so little understood." The point of his indignation was Mill's supposing that if God did not make everybody "happy" it was because He had no sufficient power, "was nob enough supplied with the article." Nothing made Carlyle more contemptuous than this coveting of "happiness." Mr. Ruskin does not endorse such contempt; yet " assuredly," he adds, " the strength of Scottish character has always been perfected by suffering. . . The whole tone of Scottish temper, ballad poetry, and music, which no other school has ever been able to imitate, has risen out of the sad. associations which ono by one have fathered round every loveliest scene in the order land. ... . There is no other country in which the roots of memory are so entwined with beauty of nature instead of the pride of men ; no other in which the song of ' Auld Lang Syne' could have been written, or Lady Nairn's ballad of' The Auld House.'" ' .