ern dress. The background is a walled city with many towers, and a lovely landscape with a river winding through. People are hawking and hunting in the far distance.

Giovanni Villani, mentioning the claims of the Pazzi to be connected with this festivity, says: "The blessed fire of Holy Saturday is distributed throughout the city; an inmate from each house goes to light a taper at the cathedral, land from this solemnity arose great honor to the noble house of Pazzi through one of their ancestors, named Pazzo, who was tall and strong, and could carry a larger fascine of tapers than any one else; he was therefore the first to take the holy fire, and then he distributed it to others."

The use of the car is also explained by the Pazzi family only taking a few tapers at first, in time these were increased in number, and a car was made to carry them. The real origin of the car being forgotten, it was transformed into a trophy, and the tapers into fireworks.

Tantum ævi longinqua valet mutare vetustas!
JANET ROSS.

From The Spectator.

MR. RUSKIN'S WILL.

mand for self-examination, is growing more and more fatal to it, and the next generation, whether they profess to be doves or not, will not forget that Christ told them also to be serpents. It is therefore with a sense of keen intellectual pleasure that we have read the last "Fors Clavigera" in which Mr. Ruskin reveals so fully this element in his character, and in the most exquisite of English explains the ruinous theories about interest and capital on which he has acted through life: gossips away about his fortune and what he has done with most of it, and what he intends to do with the remainder; rẹcapitulates his larger charities, and pardons a non-paying cousin a heavy debt - that cousin's life for a few weeks will be rather a burden to him—and, as it were, reads his will aloud in the market-place, quite simply and like a child, yet with an obvious trace of the feeling which the child expressed, when after refusing a second help of strawberries, she remarked, "Grandmamma, I am tho thatithfied with mythelf." Not that Mr. Ruskin, any more than the child, is proud of the self-sacrifice incidentally involved in his acts. He has merely acted up to his idea, but having acted up to it, he has a little glow of pleasurable self-satisfaction, which he is impelled to mention to his friends,- say, three-fourths of English-speaking and cultivated mankind. I begin to think," he mentions, "that there is something of the great man about me.” He has no fear of being accounted silly, no dread any more than a favored child of want of sympathy, no notion of the half-impression of immodesty with which Englishmen, in their Philistine reticence, receive any communication about very private pecuniary affairs. He says nothing he ought not to have said though perhaps the cousin forgiven that debt of £15,000 may feel his cheek burn a little-nothing to which the sharpest critic would object if he had said it in an autobiography to be published posthumously, and yet one reads it with a sense that the mind of the man who could say it is not as the mind of other men, that the lofty genius belongs to one who remains and will remain forever a child, a child in the Goldsmith sense, not the Harold Skimpole sense.- a child, let us add, in that highest sense in which the greatest Christian teachers have for ages made of the word a term of admiration.

Of all the qualities appertaining to men, and sometimes found even in great men, the one which is becoming most rare in our days is childlikeness. We do not mean childishness, of course, there is enough and to spare of that, particularly among politicians,- but childlikeness, the genuine simplicity of character which is not directness and not humility-being consistent occasionally with much consciousness and some innocent vanity- but is something per se, a combination of simplicity and effusiveness with the fearlessness which accompanies inexperience. Goldsmith possessed the quality always, and Wordsworth manifested it at times whenever the bizarre streak in his character, his pecuniary over-frugality, was not operative Hans Christian Andersen displayed it in annoying perfection there was something in him, according to the best accounts, of the child's shamejessness as well as of the child's simplicity and his friends attribute it, we do not know with what justice, to the Mr. Ruskin deserves, at all events, the American poet, Longfellow, but it is credit of having lived up to an idea. He becoming rarer every day. The special seems at a very early age to have imbibed culture of the hour, with its eternal de-a theory of which there are deep traces in

377

all the Asiatic creeds, which is still curi- | advised to take, and gives his bad counously general in Asia as a counsel of per- sellors a gently humorous slap for it; fection, and is perhaps one reason why partly by gifts to poor relations, he gave Asiatic money-lenders are so very hard, them straight out £17,000, and has had, and which is far from unknown in England he says, his interest in happiness, and two apparently acute City men once, in "lost," it is his own word, £15,000 to the our hearing, wasted an hour in most ear- pardoned cousin afore-mentioned; partly nest and obviously sincere defence of the by expenses on his country-house, which theory that it is wrong to take interest he puts down at £15.000; partly by in any shape in excess of principal, that gifts to Sheffield and Oxford -£14,000 when money has once been repaid, it is – but principally by a "carefully restricted morally wrong to receive any more. He yearly spending of £5,500 for thirteen has held it from the beginning, and holds years," he has sacrificed £151,000 of his it now with such force, that unless we fortune, and but that his father's propermisconceive a slightly obscure passage, he ties and pictures remain, and are greatly can see no good in poor Dr. Fraser, be- enhanced in value, would be in an uncause he consents to be bishop of the pleasant position even from his own point paradise of percentages, yet does not re- of view. Still, he really has acted up to buke the sin. Unlike most upholders of his idea, and it is difficult to know whether the fancy unlike, for instance, we be- most to wonder at the grotesque moral lieve, Mr. Sillar, Mr. Ruskin's master in economic fancy which could so beguile a its propagation -the great art-critic is brain on many sides so keen, or to admire partly logical-only partly and applies the persevering determination to do what his theory even to rent, surrendering a he thought right at the risk of any consevaluable property in Marylebone in the quences to himself. As it happens, his following terms: "I shall make over the mode of life has not done him all the harm Marylebone property entirely to the St. that might have been expected, for he has George's Company, under Miss Hill's su- still £57,000 left, arising from the inperintendence always. I have had the value creased value of certain possessions, and of it back in interest, and have no business though he at once proceeds in public to now to keep it any more," thus deciding give most of this away, chucking a comagainst himself as the French Communist petence into one relative's lap as if it were decided against the noble, "You have a bouquet of field flowers, still he retains had the estate, as you prove, for eight for himself his house, and £3.000 to be hundred years. It is time your poor spent this year "in amusing himself at neighbor had his turn.” Mr. Ruskin, of Venice or elsewhere," and £12,000 to be course, is not quite logical, for he alto- invested in consols, to supply the £360 a gether fails to perceive that in giving away year on which a bachelor gentleman ought his property he performs a supreme act of to live, or if he cannot, "deserves speedily ownership, asserts in the most emphatic to die." All this is explained in print, in way that he has the right which he dis- letters addressed to working-men to whom claims, and is inconsistent with himself, as he has been a benefactor, and who, though he also is in another respect. He owns worshipping him, will probably no more some bank-shares, which because the bank understand why he thinks he must only has distributed or will distribute more take interest for thirty-three years, than money than they cost, have tripled in why it seems to him perfectly reasonable value, and he does not reject that incre- to expend £3,000 in one last year of ment as he clearly ought to do, but rather "amusing himself" at Venice or elsepats himself on the back on account of where. Could he not give that box of that one successful investment. "I'm not myrrh to the poor too? They will probaalways," he seems to say, "such a bad bly decide, with the majority, not as Mr. business man." It is, however, absurd to Ruskin decides, "I am beginning, for the expect logical consistency from a man first time in my life, to admit some notion whose rule of consistency is to think into my head that I am a great man," but himself consistent as long as he is that he is "an utterly good one, though a consistently unselfish and faithful to his little cracky," the very form of his goodnotions, and Mr. Ruskin has been both. ness puzzling them inexpressibly. And He inherited £157,000 from his father and certainly no form of goodness less like the mother in cash, besides other possessions; regular English Protestant respectable and partly by bad investments, - he lost Islington ideal, even when a very noble £20,000 on some mortgages he had been one, could be imagined. That a wealthy

66

From The Spectator.

MICROSCOPIC EXTRAVAGANCE.

ONE of the most childlike and in its way amusing paragraphs in Mr. Ruskin's anticipatory will, is the one in which he announces that he intends for the future to live in his country-house on £360 a year. It is of course possible that he should do it, though he will find it more difficult than he expects. The taxes on his house - which cost with some rebuilding and much furniture £15,000-the "regular repairs," which are always accidental and always recur, the renewal of carpets and the like, will cost him at least a fourth of his income, — probably much more; and a solitary gardener, to keep the place decent, will not be secured and provided with materials for less than another fourth; but still if Mr. Ruskin can put up with one servant, confine his journeys to his own feet, enjoy the simplest food, and go without good wine, the remaining half of his allowance to himself will suffice to keep him alive and in good health. The necessaries of life do not cost very much, or the poor could not live at all; if there are no servants, there is little waste; and to many a clergyman as cultivated as Mr. Ruskin, though not as sensitive to the beautiful, the position he says he is about to assume would seem to be too luxurious. The clergyman, however, has been trained to a vir

man should lead a life of strenuous selfdenial for others' sake, enjoying poverty and welcoming hardness of life in order that others may cease to suffer, is, fortunately, no rare spectacle in England. Nor is voluntary poverty, as a form of asceticism, a training of the whole nature, at all beyond the conception of our countrymen, or even, in some rare cases, their habitual practice; while instances of self-denial for a definite object, to perform a definite duty, are happily common enough, if only in the vulgar way of sparing in order to pay off debts owed by another. But that a man should be at once art-critic and philanthropist, virtuoso and fanatic for an inconvenient idea; that he should be sensitively alive to the sensuous luxury of art in all aspects, moved throughout his being by a glorious glimpse of color or of form, yet benevolent to extremity, that he should unite the qualities of collector and of ascetic, this is as nearly inconceivable to them as that a man should be at once martyr and aristocrat, saint and sacerdotalist, proud to insanity of birth, fanatically haughty as to his priesthood, yet willing to lay down life in succoring the plague-stricken people whom in health he still held by some law of nature to be less than, as a cardinal and a noble, he himself was. Catholics only, and Catholics of the mystical sort, will quite appreciate the manner of man that Mr. Ruskin - if indeed his powers remain intact - must be, not Protestants of Islington. They rever-tue which Mr. Ruskin, we should fear, ence Christ as he does; but Christ in the manger, the child-Christ of Matthew Arnold and the Catholics, is not the one that they adore.

It is not worth while, perhaps, to offer a serious argument against Mr. Ruskin's conclusions. The temptation of Englishmen is not towards his views of property, his generosity, or his fanaticism for an unprofitable idea. The English world is not injured, is rather benefited, by a solitary example of a man who, keenly aware of all that wealth can give him in collecting the treasures he values, is still so utterly and yet not scornfully contemptuous, not only of accumulating, but even of preserving what he has. But as we have mentioned his statement, we may just say that we doubt whether mere abandonment of money is a virtue, whether it is not open to the objection which has always made reasoners think the self-mutilation of Hindoo ascetics morally wrong. What right have you to abandon a power which the very capacity of abandoning it shows that you can profitably use?

does not possess, which is most difficult for the rich to acquire, and which is in our day perhaps the most distinctive mark of the cultivated poor,- the economy of loose silver. There is no differentia between the well-to-do and the poor which is more marked than that between their habitual conduct as regards the minor expenditures of daily life. The one has acquired a second nature, an instinct of self-defence which the other never missed. The poor man has learned by hard experience the great truth that a shilling a day is £18 5s. a year, that ten shillings a day is more than a curate's salary, and that if he indulges himself in the least in the use of the "silver key," which makes all doors so easy and daily life so smooth, all the pinching economy in his home will go for nothing. The margin between his income and his necessary expenditure which he strives so hard to create will disappear at once in an endless outflow of money for which he has nothing to show. The rich man, on the contrary, unless frugal by nature to a degree unusual among his

necessary, but still it is pleasant, and is a great deal more "civilized" a method of taking food than eating a biscuit in office, with clients and business acquaintances always dropping in. A pint of claret a day is not injurious to health, and it is very doubtful if it is good for the stomach that the claret should be too cheap. One must see a couple of papers a day, say a Times and a Pall Mall Gazette, and take one weekly newspaper, and buy one of the tittle-tattle papers pretty regularly as one passes the book-stall. A book now and then cannot be considered wasteful, indeed, a book is always an economy; a toy of any sort, whether for grown-ups or little folk, is usually acceptable; and the gift of shillings to servants, porters, beggars, or other people who look as if they expected douceurs, and would be importunate if they did not get them, is very near

opinion except that of the receiver. We have mentioned nothing in the least degree out of the way, nothing indicating a hobby, nothing for which a man earning, say, £2,000 a year, would dream of condemning himself, and yet we have mentioned expenditures almost equal to the average income of English junior clergymen. Hundreds among our readers, if they will examine their expenditure with the single-eyed keenness with which they would examine a lawyer's bill or a milliner's account, will know that the following table is for them an under-statement of the truth:

kind, spends shillings almost without knowing it, merely to facilitate his movements or help to pass his day, and would be utterly astonished if he ever put down his yearly outgoings in mere silver in a formal account. He would hardly believe his eyes, and would resolve upon a retrenchment, which, nevertheless, he would find more difficult than almost any serious economy. It is much easier to lay down a carriage than to abstain from taking a cab, much less annoying to do without wine than to drink Gladstone claret, far less worrying to cease to entertain, than to cease to over-reward every man who does you some slight service. There is no retrenchment so difficult to a man who has been rich, or even well off, as economy in silver, and no extravagance so tempting to a man who has risen to a fair income, and perhaps increased his weight, and with it the indolence of his naturally a virtue, a sort of charity in everybody's temperament, as extravagance in shillings. The sum which is yearly spent in this way, more especially in London, by men who do not wish to be wasteful, but who are not severely self-restrained as to their expenditure, would appear to poorer men, anxious to keep up appearances and lead the refined life upon small means, almost incredible, and we are not sure that they would not condemn it as also slightly wicked. It seems so hard to them that an income should be allowed, so to speak, to perspire away. We have known professional men in London, men earning their own incomes, who did not intend to be extravagant, and in great matters were even frugal, who had no especial reason for being in a hurry, and who were quite capable of self-denial, spend two-thirds of Mr. Ruskin's supposed income in cabs alone, and throw away double the sum in outlays for which they had nothing to show, and which indeed they were wholly unable to remember. t Of course, it is the young and rich who are the most guilty in this way, but this form of extravagance is constantly found among men who are not thoughtless, who are earning their own living, and who would be rather shocked if they were told that they squandered in meaningless indulgences as much as would keep a respectable family in comfort. It is a great bore to be walking when one is in a hurry, and one is always in a hurry to avoid a tedious walk. Two or three cigars a day cannot matter much, and they yield a tranquillity of spirit and provide an exemption from ennui which are worth all the money. A lunch at the club is not

si d.

0

6

I 6

Cabs per diem
Three cigars
Lunch.
Pint of wine
Newspapers.
Books .
Little purchases
Vails of all sorts

12

2

The account is wholly exclusive of needless waste in dress caused by mere thoughtlessness and indifference to expense, and includes no necessary whatever except the Times, and yet the total amounts to more than £220 a year, or, as we said before, nearly two-thirds of the total sum which Mr. Ruskin has put down as the income on which if an English bachelor gentleman cannot live he ought to die and be done with it. We believe there are men in London by no means "rich," as riches are now counted, who spend twice the