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For the convenience of the reader—whether or not he be already in touch with Mr. Ruskin’s matured writings, of which this little volume contains assuredly some of the earliest-recorded germs of thought emanating from the author’s boyish mind—it has been deemed expedient to append a list of those works of Mr. Ruskin’s which contain the expansion of the various axioms laid down and arguments brought forward in these Juvenilia, which, as the editor’s preface tells us, were addressed to the man whose influence, especially in literary matters, had some considerable part in the formation of his pupil’s mind.

In connection with the essay “Does the perusal of works of fiction act favourably, or unfavourably, on the moral character?” references should be made to Mr. Ruskin’s amplifications of the subject, as well as his desultory allusions in such works as “Modern Painters,” “Fors Clavigera,” “On the Old Road” (more particularly the articles on “Fiction, Fair and Foul”), “Elements of Drawing” (in the appendix on “Things to be Studied”), “Munera Pulveris” (the chapter on “Government”), “Sesame and Lilies,” “Arrows of the Chace,” “Præterita,” “Love’s Meinie,” and “The Queen of the Air.”

With regard to the various subjects touched upon in the first of the letters, dated from Rome, Dec. 31 (written in 1840), the reader will find it useful to refer to the following works:—

“The Two Paths,” “Lectures on Art, 1870,” “The Bible of Amiens,” “Fors Clavigera,” “Modern Painters,” and works dealing more particularly with Italian art, such as “Val d’Arno,” “Ariadne Florentina,” and “Mornings in Florence.” To pick out special portions of the letter for remark would be making invidious distinctions; but there are noteworthy points in the writer’s description of the Mediterranean coast—his impressions of Rome, and the Italian peasantry (“neither fish nor flesh, neither noble nor fisherman,” as he described the population of Venice later on in “Fors Clavigera,” vol. v. letter 49)—and the expression of his strong sense of the evils of “cramming” for University honours, afterwards endorsed more emphatically in the appeal to parents, in the closing sentences of the Lecture on Serpents (“Deucalion,” pt. 7).

The second letter (dated six months later) contains, inter alia, what—to readers of Mr. Ruskin’s later eulogiums of Italy—will come as an astounding piece of news—his assertion that “the climate of Italy never did agree with me;” also a remark, by the way, on the submission of Newman (the late Cardinal Newman) “to his Bishop in the affair of the Tracts,” which leads to a dissertation on the then burning question of the day and the various classes of disputants—interesting for its evidence of the young writer’s growing doubts of the infallibility of that Evangelical school in whose dogmas he had been brought up. His remarks on his parents’ experiences, as well as his own, of the Protestant churches in Italy, remind one of the crisis in his life—upon which he has dwelt so strongly and repeatedly in “Præterita,” “Fors Clavigera,” and elsewhere—on that Sunday in 1858 when he turned from the little Waldensian chapel in Turin, for an hour’s meditation in the gallery “where Paul Veronese’s ‘Solomon and the Queen of Sheba’ glowed in full afternoon light,” and felt that “that day my Evangelical beliefs were put away, to be debated of no more” (“Præterita,” vol. iii. chap. i.).

In the third letter, written from Leamington in Sept. 1841, we have the embryo of ideas which expanded later on into the “Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds”; the “Letters on the Lord’s Prayer”; the politico-economical question raised in “Fors Clavigera,” with its passionate appeal (vol. v. letter 58)—“What am I myself, then, infirm and old, who take, or claim, leadership even of these lords? God forbid that I should claim it; it is thrust and compelled on me—utterly against my will, utterly to my distress, utterly—in many things—to my shame. But I have found no other man in England, none in Europe, ready to receive it, or even desiring to make himself capable of receiving it. Such as I am, to my own amazement I stand—so far as I can discern—alone in conviction, in hope, and in resolution, in the wilderness of this modern school. Bred in luxury, which I perceive to have been unjust to others, and destructive to myself; vacillating, foolish, and miserably failing in all my own conduct in life, and blown about hopelessly by storms of passion I, a man clothed in soft raiment, I, a reed shaken with the wind, have yet this message to all men again entrusted to me: ‘Behold, the axe is laid to the root of the tree. Whatsoever tree therefore bringeth not forth good fruit, shall be hewn down and cast into the fire.’ ” And the later protest for leisure to pursue the line of work which is peculiarly his own—“Here is a little grey cockle-shell lying beside me, which I gathered, the other evening, out of the dust of the island of St. Helena, and a brightly spotted snail-shell, from the thirsty sands of Lido; and I want to set myself to draw these, and describe them, in peace. Yes! all my friends say, ‘that is my business; why can’t I mind it, and be happy?’ Well, good friends, I would fain please you, and myself with you; and live here in my Venetian palace, luxurious; scrutinant of dome, cloud, and cockle-shell..... But, alas! my prudent friends, little enough of all that I have a mind to may be permitted me. For this green tide that eddies by my threshold is full of floating corpses, and I must leave my dinner to bury them, since I cannot save; and put my cockle-shell in cap, and take my staff in hand, to seek an unencumbered shore” (“Fors Clavigera,” vol. vi. letter 72). Also the sense of greater responsibility that there should be in the “highly bred and trained English, French, Austrian, or Italian gentleman (much more a lady),” who “will have some duties to do in return—duties of living belfry and rampart” (“Sesame and Lilies,” Lecture I.), and, lastly, the foundation of the ethical part of his art teaching upon the formulæ, “Man’s use and function are, to be the witness of the glory of God and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience and resultant happiness,” and “All great art is praise,” constantly dwelt upon throughout such works as “Modern Painters,” “The Laws of Fésole,” “Aratra Pentilici,” “The Eagle’s Nest,” “Lectures on Art, 1870,” and “The Art of England.”