inch of the finest Valenciennes lace, and that she has to do it, sitting in a dark cellar, with the light only admitted through a narrow slit, to concentrate it on the work. It's enough to make one give up wearing

Valenciennes at all!"

This last piece of impassioned young lady's English, translated into unimpassioned old gentleman's English, means, I suppose, that “it is very shocking, but not at all enough to make one give up wearing Valenciennes." Nor should it be. But it should be quite enough to make one inquire into the matter; ascertain with what degree of fineness lace can be made in the open daylight and fresh air of France; request some benevolent lady friend, who has nothing else to do, to undertake the sale of such lace, with due Episcopal superintendence of the relieved workers; and buy one's lace only from this benevolent ladyBishop.

LETTER LXIX.

I HAVE just been down to Barmouth to see the tenants on the first bit of ground,-noble crystalline rock, I am thankful to say,-possessed by St. George in the island.

I find the rain coming through roofs, and the wind through walls, more than I think proper, and have ordered repairs ; and for some time to come, the little rents of these cottages will be spent entirely in the bettering of them, or in extending some garden ground, fenced with furze hedge against the west wind by the most ingenious of our tenants.

And in connection with this first-however small-beginning under my own eyes of St. George's work,—(already some repairs had been made by my direction, under the superintendence of the donor of the land, Mrs. Talbot, before I could go to see the place)-I must state again clearly our St. George's principle of rent. It is taken first as the acknowledgment of the authority of the Society over the land, and in the amount judged by the Master to be just, according to the circumstances of the person and place, for the tenant to pay as a contribution to the funds of the Society. The tenant has no claim to the return of the rent in improvements on his ground or his house; and I order the repairs at Barmouth as part of the Company's general action, not as return of the rent to the tenant. The reader will thus see that our so-called 'rents' are in fact taxes laid on the tenants for the advancement of the work of the Company. And all so-called rents are, in like manner, taxes laid on the labourer for the advancement of the work of his landlord. If that work be beneficial, on the whole, to the estate, and of all who live on it, the rents are on a right footing; but if they are ab stracted by the landlord to his own private uses, he is merely another form of the old mediæval Knight of Evilstone, living as hawk in eyrie.

It chanced, while I set this work on foot at Barmouth, that a paragraph was sent me out of a Carlisle paper, giving the information that all Lord Lonsdale's tenants have received notice to quit, that the farms might be re-valued. I requested my correspondent to ascertain for me the manner of the holdings on Lord Lonsdale's estates ;—his reply is the third article in our correspondence this month, and I beg to recommend it to the reader's most earnest attention. What it says of rents, with the exception indicated in my note, is right; and cannot be more tersely or clearly expressed. What it says of ground-produce is only partially right. To discover another America at our own doors would not be any advantage to us ;-nor even to make England bigger. We have no business to want England to be bigger, any more than the world to be bigger. The question is not, for us, how much land God ought to have given us; but to fill the land He has given us, with the wisest and best inhabitants we can. I could give a plan, if I chose, with great ease, for the maintenance of a greatly increased quantity of inhabitants, on iron scaffolding, by pulverizing our mountains, and strewing the duly pulverized and, by wise medical geology, drugged materials, over the upper stages; carrying on our present ingenious manufactures in the dark lower stories. But the arrangement, even if it could be at once achieved, would be of no advantage to England.

Whereas St. George's arrangements, which are to take the hills, streams, and fields that God has made for us; to keep them as lovely, pure, and orderly as we can; *to gather their carefully cultivated fruit in due season; and if our children then multiply so that we cannot feed them, to seek other lands to cultivate in like manner, these arrangements, I repeat, will be found very advantageous indeed, as they always have been; wheresoever even in any minor degree enforced. In some happy countries they have been so, many a

*What can be done, ultimately, it is not yet in human imagination to conceive. What has been done, by one sensible man, for the land he had under control, may be read in the fourth article of our correspondence.

long year already; and the following letter from a recent traveller in one of them, may further illustrate the description given in a Fors of early date, of the felicity verily and visibly to be secured by their practice.

"Dear Professor Ruskin,-I have long intended to write. to you, but the mountain of matters I had to tell you has increased till Pelion is piled upon Ossa within my mind, and so I must confine myself to one or two points. In the Black Forest, and more especially in remote mountain valleys of Tyrol, I have found the people living more or less according to principles laid down for the Company of St. George. I have seen the rules so much descried, and even ridiculed, in England, wrought into the whole life of the people. One may still find villages and communes where lawsuits are impossible-a head-man of their own deciding all disputes; where the simplest honesty and friendliness are all but universal, and the stranger is taken in only in the better sense of the phrase; where the nearest approach to steam power is the avalanche of early summer; where there are no wheeled vehicles, and all burthens are carried on the backs of men and mules," (my dear friend, I really don't want people to do without donkey-carts, or pony-chaises; nay, I was entirely delighted at Dolgelly, the other day, to meet a four-in-hand coach-driven by the coachman's daughter;) "where rich and poor must fare alike on the simple food and cheap but sound wine of the country; where the men still carve wood, and the women spin and weave, during the long hours of winter; and where the folk still take genuine delight in picturesque dress, and daily church-going, and have not reduced both to the dreary felon's uniform of English respectability. With these unconscious followers of Ruskin, and Companions of St. George, I formed deep friendships; and for me, if I ever revisit the wild recesses of the Etzthal, it will almost be like going amongst my own people and to my own home. Indeed, wherever I left the beaten track of tourists, and the further I left it, so did the friendliness of my entertainers increase. It was evident they regarded me not as a mere purse-bearing animal, but as an argosy of quite a different sort-a human spirit coming from afar, from a land belonging,' as one of them conjectured, to Spain,' and laden with all kinds of new knowledge and strange ideas,

of which they would gladly have some share. And so towards the close of a dinner, or supper, the meek-eyed hostess would come and sit beside me, hoping I had enjoyed a happy meal;' and after a complimentary sip from my glass, ask me all sorts of delightful and simple questions about myself, and my family, and my country. Or the landlord would come sometimes,-alas, at the very beginning of a meal,—and from huge pipe bowl, wonderfully painted with Crucifixion or Madonna, blow clouds of anything but incense smoke. But the intention of honouring and amusing me were none the less apparent."

With my friend's pleasant days among this wise and happy people, I will forthwith compare the very unpleasant day I spent myself on my journey to Barmouth, among unwise and wretched ones; one incident occurring in it being of extreme significance. I had driven from Brantwood in early morning down the valley of the Crake, and took train first at the Ulverston station, settling myself in the corner of a carriage next the sea, for better prospect thereof. In the other corner was a respectable, stolid, middle-aged man reading his paper.

I had left my Coniston lake in dashing ripples under a south wind, thick with rain; but the tide lay smooth and silent along the sands; melancholy in absolute pause of motion, nor ebb nor flow distinguishable ;-here and there, among the shelves of grey shore, a little ruffling of their apparent pools marked stray threadings of river-current.

At Grange, talking loud, got in two young coxcombs; who reclined themselves on the opposite cushions. One had a thin stick, with which, in a kind of St. Vitus's dance, partly affectation of nonchalance, partly real fever produced by the intolerable idleness of his mind and body, he rapped on the elbow of his seat, poked at the button-holes of the window strap, and switched his boots, or the air, all the way from Grange to the last station before Carnforth, he and his friend talking yacht and regatta, listlessly ;-the St. Vitus's, meantime, dancing one expressing his opinion that "the most dangerous thing to do on these lakes was going before