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Besides, he was very old when, in 1885, he wrote Praeterita. Long before that date, moreover, others than he had begun to have queer views. The halcyon days were over. Even in the 'sixties there were many dark and cumulose clouds. It was believed, however, that these would pass. 'Punch, our ever-quick interpreter, made light of them.
In the second chapter of Praeterita he is even more explicit. "I have next with deeper gratitude to chronicle what I owed to my mother for the resolute persistent lessons which so exercised me in the Scripture, as to make every word of them familiar in my ear as habitual music, yet in that familiarity reverenced as transcending all thought and ordering all conduct."
John Ruskin's continued to be the smoothest, easiest style in our English literature. He also was a Hebraic spirit, but of the gentler type. Mr. Chapman calls him the Elisha to Carlyle's, Elijah, a capital comparison. Ruskin is one of the few writers who have told us what formed their style. In the first chapter of Praeterita he pays tribute to his mother.
'Leges et constitutiones futuris certum est dare formam negotiis, non ad facta praeterita revocari, nisi nominatim, et de praeterito tempore, et adhuc pendentibus negotiis cautum sit. This passage, according to the best interpretation of the civilians, relates not merely to future suits, but to future, as contradistinguished from past, contracts and vested rights.
He grew up a solitary child without playmates. This solitude was relieved when his parents took him on occasional trips through England, Switzerland, and Italy. In Praeterita he tells in an inimitable way how the most portentious interruption to his solitude came in 1836, when his father's Spanish partner came with his four beautiful daughters to visit Herne Hill.
Prophets of the Nineteenth Century: Carlyle, Ruskin, and Tolstoi. Bates, Herbert. Annotated edition, with Introduction, of Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies" and "The King of the Golden River." Ruskin's "Praeterita": An Autobiography.
'Poor Anne remained very servile in soul all her days; and was altogether occupied, from the age of fifteen to seventy-two, in doing other people's wills, not her own. Thus wrote Ruskin, in Praeterita, of one who had been his nurse, and his father's. Perhaps the passage is somewhat marred by its first word. But Ruskin had queer views on many subjects.
Of the author's home-life we get many delightful reminiscences in "Praeterita," with entertaining talks of his childhood days, his youthful companions, his toys and animate pets, his early playful adventures in authorship, and other garrulities with which, late in life when the work, as it remains, was incompletely put together, he beguiled the weariness and feebleness of old age.
Severn, the "angel of the house," and wrote, at Professor Norton's suggestion, Praeterita, one of his most interesting books, in which he describes the events of his youth from his own view point. He died quietly in 1900, and was buried, as he wished, without funeral pomp or public ceremony, in the little churchyard at Coniston.
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