FORS CLAVIGERA. LETTER LVI. I BELIEVE my readers will scarcely thank me for printing, this month, instead of the continuation of the letter from Wakefield, a theological essay by Mr. Lyttel. But it is my first business, in Fors, to be just,-and only my second or third to be entertaining; so that any person who conceives himself to have been misrepresented must always have my types at his command. On the other side, I must point out, before entering further into controversy of any kind, the constant habit in my antagonists of misrepresenting me. For instance; in an article forwarded to me from a local paper, urging what it can in defence of the arrangements noticed by me as offensive, at Kirby Lonsdale and Clapham, I find this sentence: "The squire's house does not escape, though one can see no reason for the remark unless it be that Mr. Ruskin dislikes lords, squires, and clergymen." Now I have good reason for supposing this article to have been written by a gentleman ;-and even an amiable gentleman, who, feeling himself hurt, and not at all wishing to hurt anybody, very naturally cries out and thinks it monstrous in me to hurt him; or his own pet lord, or squire. But he never thinks what wrong there may be in printing his own momentary impression of the character of a man who has been thirty years before the public, without taking the smallest pains to ascertain whether his notion be true or false. happens, by Fors' appointment, that the piece of my 2e which I have already written for this month's let... satheiently answers the imputation of my dislike to cox and squires. But I will preface it, in order to illusyo my dislike of clergymen, by a later bit of biography; wica, at the rate of my present progress in giving account et myself, I should otherwise, as nearly as I can calculate, reach only about the year 1975. Last summer, in Rome, I lodged at the Hotel de Russie; ad, the archway of the courtyard of that mansion, waited way, in the mornings, a Capuchin friar, begging for his Now, though I greatly object to any clergyman's coming and taking mo by the throat, and saying 'Pay me that ou owest,' I never pass a begging friar without giving him. pence, or the equivalent fivepence of foreign coin ;-extending the charity even occasionally as far as tenpence, if o fivepenny-bit chance to be in my purse. And this partoular begging friar having a gentle face, and a long white beard, and a beautiful cloak, like a blanket ; and being altogether the pleasantest sight, next to Sandro Botticelli's Zipporah, I was like to see in Rome in the course of the day, I always gave him the extra fivepence for looking so nice; which generosity so worked on his mind,-(the more usual English religious sentiment in Rome expending itself rather in buying poetical pictures of monks than in filling their bellies), that, after some six or seven doles of tenpences, he must needs take my hand one day, and try to kiss it. Which being only just able to prevent, I took him round the neck and kissed his lips instead: and this, it seems, was more to him than the tenpences, for, next day, he brought me a little reliquary, with a certificated fibre in it of St. Francis' cloak, (the hair one, now preserved at Assisi); and when afterwards I showed my friend Fra Antonio, the Assisi sacristan, what I had got, it was a pleasure to see him open his eyes, wider than Monsieur the Syndic at Hansli's fifty thousand crowns. He thought I must have come by it dishonestly; but not I, a whit,—for I most carefully explained to |