Formulas with it, how he managed at all under such circumstances: that is a thing worth seeing. A thing 'to be looked at with reverence, with pity, with awe.' That Church of St. Clement Danes, where Johnson still worshipped in the era of Voltaire, is to me a venerable place.

5

It was in virtue of his sincerity, of his speaking still in some sort from the heart of Nature, though in the current artificial dialect, that Johnson was a Prophet. Are not all dialects 'artificial'? Artificial things are not all false;-nay every true Product of Nature will infallibly shape itself; we 10 may say all artificial things are, at the starting of them, true. What we call 'Formulas' are not in their origin bad; they are indispensably good. Formula is method, habitude; found wherever man is found. Formulas fashion themselves as Paths do, as beaten Highways, leading towards some sacred 15 or high object, whither many men are bent. Consider it. One man, full of heartfelt earnest impulse, finds-out a way of doing somewhat, were it of uttering his soul's reverence for the Highest, were it but of fitly saluting his fellow-man. An inventor was needed to do that, a poet; he has articulated 20 the dim-struggling thought that dwelt in his own and many hearts. This is his way of doing that; these are his footsteps, the beginning of a 'Path.' And now see: the second man travels naturally in the footsteps of his foregoer, it is the easiest method. In the footsteps of his foregoer; yet with 25 improvements, with changes where such seem good; at all events with enlargements, the Path ever widening itself as more travel it ;-till at last there is a broad Highway whereon the whole world may travel and drive. While there remains a City or Shrine, or any Reality to drive to, at the farther 30 end, the Highway shall be right welcome! When the City is gone, we will forsake the Highway. In this manner all Institutions, Practices, Regulated Things in the world have come into existence, and gone out of existence. Formulas all begin by being full of substance; you may call them the skin, 35 the articulation into shape, into limbs and skin, of a sub

stance that is already there: they had not been there otherwise. Idols . . . are not idolatrous till they become doubtful, empty for the worshipper's heart. Much as we talk against Formulas, I hope no one of us is ignorant withal of 5 the high significance of true Formulas; that they were, and will ever be, the indispensablest furniture of our habitation in this world.

Mark, too, how little Johnson boasts of his 'sincerity.' He has no suspicion of his being particularly sincere,-of 10 his being particularly anything! A hard-struggling, wearyhearted man, or 'scholar' as he calls himself, trying hard to get some honest livelihood in the world, not to starve, but to live-without stealing! A noble unconsciousness is in him. He does not 'engrave Truth on his watch-seal'; no, but he 15 stands by truth, speaks by it, works and lives by it. Thus it ever is. Think of it once more. The man whom Nature has appointed to do great things is, first of all, furnished with that openness to Nature which renders him incapable of being insincere! To his large, open, deep-feeling heart Nature is zo a Fact: all hearsay is hearsay; the unspeakable greatness of this Mystery of Life, let him acknowledge it or not, nay even though he seem to forget it or deny it, is ever present to him, -fearful and wonderful, on this hand and on that. He has a basis of sincerity; unrecognised, because never questioned or 25 capable of question. Mirabeau, Mahomet, Cromwell, Napoleon: all the Great Men I ever heard-of have this as the primary material of them. Innumerable commonplace men are debating, are talking everywhere their commonplace doctrines, which they have learned by logic, by rote, at second30 hand: to that kind of man all this is still nothing. He must have truth; truth which he feels to be true. How shall he stand otherwise? His whole soul, at all moments, in all ways, tells him that there is no standing. He is under the noble necessity of being true. Johnson's way of thinking 35 about this world is not mine, any more than Mahomet's was:

but I recognise the everlasting element of heart-sincerity in

both; and see with pleasure how neither of them remains ineffectual. Neither of them is as chaff sown; in both of them is something which the seed-field will grow.

Johnson was a Prophet to his people; preached a Gospel to them, as all like him always do. The highest Gospel he 5 preached we may describe as a kind of Moral Prudence: 'in a world where much is to be done, and little is to be known,' see how you will do it! A thing well worth preaching. 'A world where much is to be done, and little is to be known:' do not sink yourselves in boundless bottomless abysses of 10 Doubt, of wretched god-forgetting Unbelief;-you were miserable then, powerless, mad: how could you do or work at all? Such Gospel Johnson preached and taught ;-coupled, theoretically and practically, with this other great Gospel, 'Clear your mind of Cant!' Have no trade with Cant: stand 15 on the cold mud in the frosty weather, but let it be in your own real torn shoes: 'that will be better for you,' as Mahomet says! I call this, I call these two things joined together, a great Gospel, the greatest perhaps that was possible at that time.

20

Johnson's Writings, which once had such currency and celebrity, are now, as it were, disowned by the young generation. It is not wonderful; Johnson's opinions are fast becoming obsolete: but his style of thinking and of living, we may hope, will never become obsolete. I find in Johnson's 25 Books the indisputablest traces of a great intellect and a great heart;-ever welcome, under what obstructions and perversions soever. They are sincere words, those of his; he means things by them. A wondrous buckram style,-the best he could get to then; a measured grandiloquence, step- 30 ping or rather stalking along in a very solemn way, grown obsolete now; sometimes a tumid size of phraseology not in proportion to the contents of it: all this you will put-up with. For the phraseology, tumid or not, has always something within it. So many beautiful styles and books, with nothing 35 in them; a man is a malefactor to the world who writes

such! They are the avoidable kind!-Had Johnson left nothing but his Dictionary, one might have traced there a great intellect, a genuine man. Looking to its clearness of definition, its general solidity, honesty, insight and success5 ful method, it may be called the best of all Dictionaries. There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness; it stands there like a great solid square-built edifice, finished, symmetrically complete: you judge that a true Builder did it.

JOHN RUSKIN

THE STONES OF VENICE

VOLUME II. CHAPTER IV. ST. MARK'S

§ X. And now I wish that the reader, before I bring him 10 into St. Mark's Place, would imagine himself for a little time in a quiet English cathedral town, and walk with me to the west front of its cathedral. Let us go together up the more retired street, at the end of which we can see the pinnacles of one of the towers, and then through the low gray gateway, 15 with its battlemented top and small latticed window in the centre, into the inner private-looking road or close, where nothing goes in but the carts of the tradesmen who supply the bishop and the chapter, and where there are little shaven grass-plots, fenced in by neat rails, before old-fashioned 20 groups of somewhat diminutive and excessively trim houses, with little oriel and bay windows jutting out here and there, and deep wooden cornices and eaves painted cream colour and white, and small porches to their doors in the shape of cockle-shells, or little, crooked, thick, indescribable wooder 25 gables warped a little on one side; and so forward till we come to larger houses, also old-fashioned, but of red brick, and with gardens behind them, and fruit walls, which show here and there, among the nectarines, the vestiges of an old cloister arch or shaft, and looking in front on the cathedral

square itself, laid out in rigid divisions of smooth grass and gravel walk, yet not uncheerful, especially on the sunny side where the canons' children are walking with their nurserymaids. And so, taking care not to tread on the grass, we will go along the straight walk to the west front, and 5 there stand for a time, looking up at its deep-pointed porches and the dark places between their pillars where there were statues once, and where the fragments, here and there, of a stately figure are still left, which has in it the likeness of a king, perhaps indeed a king on earth, perhaps a saintly king 10 long ago in heaven; and so, higher and higher up to the great mouldering wall of rugged sculpture and confused arcades, shattered, and gray, and grisly with heads of dragons and mocking fiends, worn by the rain and swirling winds into yet unseemlier shape, and coloured on their stony scales by the 15 deep russet-orange lichen, melancholy gold; and so, higher still, to the bleak towers, so far above that the eye loses itself among the bosses of their traceries, though they are rude and strong, and only sees, like a drift of eddying black points, now closing, now scattering, and now settling suddenly into 20 invisible places among the bosses and flowers, the crowd of restless birds that fill the whole square with that strange clangour of theirs, so harsh and yet so soothing, like the cries of birds on a solitary coast between the cliffs and sea.

§ XI. Think for a little while of that scene, and the mean- 25 ing of all its small formalisms, mixed with its serene sublimity. Estimate its secluded, continuous, drowsy felicities, and its evidence of the sense and steady performance of such kind of duties as can be regulated by the cathedral clock; and weigh the influence of those dark towers on all who have 30 passed through the lonely square at their feet for centuries, and on all who have seen them rising far away over the wooded plain, or catching on their square masses the last rays of the sunset, when the city at their feet was indicated only by the mist at the bend of the river. And then let us quickly 35 recollect that we are in Venice, and land at the extremity of