to Arrows of the Chace was written at Rouen, and the Epilogue at Amiens. The tour was in two parts. He went first for six weeks with Laurence Hilliard and one of his sisters; then crossed to Dover and stayed for some days with his friends, Miss Gale and her sister,2 at Canterbury; and next returned to France, being accompanied by Mr. Arthur Severn and Mr. Brabazon. Those who saw the Ruskin exhibition in London in 1907 will remember many drawings made on this tour, and among them one which was inscribed as sketched in company with Mr. Brabazon, and which shows an impressionist "breadth" not always characteristic of Ruskin's work. French scenery exercised its old spell over him, and he was happy to find some of his favourite spots unspoilt. "Yesterday a really happy day," he wrote in his diary (August 27), "finding my lovely courtyard safe in the morning, and St. Riquier exquisite and calm in evening, and France as lovely as ever." "The villages along the coteau, from Abbeville here," he wrote at Amiens (August 29), "though all with north exposure, were entirely divine with their orchards and harvests, and hills of sweet pastoral swelling above." At Beauvais, where Ruskin made the sketch here reproduced, he found "more left in the town than ever he hoped to see again in France," and even the new railway-line thither from Amiens pleased him with "every instant a newly divine landscape of wood, harvest-field, and coteau" (August 31). At Chartres he was equally happy : 4 "(September 10.)-Up, D.G., in perfectly good health and lovely sunshine, and one thing lovelier than another, in the inexhaustible old town. Up to crown of the northern spire last night, just at the best hour before sunset; all the plain a-glow for (say under command of eye) forty miles each way, as clear as if the air were glass-six thousand square miles of champaign and winding woods along the Eure." "The Springs of Eure" was the title he chose for an intended, but unwritten, book "wholly to be given to the Cathedral of Chartres."5 But it was at Amiens that on this tour his chief work lay. He The following was his itinerary: Dover (August 21), Calais (August 23), Abbeville (August 25), Amiens (August 28), Beauvais (August 30), Paris (September 1), Chartres (September 7), Paris (September 17), Rouen (September 21), Dieppe (September 28), Canterbury (October 2), Amiens (October 11), Herne Hill (November 4). 2 For whom, see Præterita, i. § 85. No. 30 in the Catalogue (Picquigny). For a view of this courtyard, see Plate VII. in Vol. XIV. (p. 388); and for other mention of St. Riquier, Vol. XIX. p. xxxix., and Præterita, i. § 177. See the Plan of Our Fathers; below, p. 186. |