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interested in — and will see the Lake Country first from 

 my terrace, where, however, Darwin has walked also. 

 And it is a terrace — a mere nook of turf above a nest of 

 garden — but commanding such a piece of lake and hill 

 as can only be seen in England. 



I shall be here all the year, and whenever you can 

 prevail on Lady Lubbock to seclude herself from the 

 world — (there is not a house south of us on either side 

 the lake for four miles) — and on Miss Lubbock to take 

 up her quarrel where we broke off — irreconcilable — you 

 will find Brantwood gate wide on its furthest hinges 

 to you. 



You will have to put up with cottage fare — and 

 perhaps — with a couple of days' rain. I have only a 

 country cook — and when it rains here, it does not know 

 how to stop. For the rest, if you come when the roses 

 are yet in bloom and the heather in the bud, you will not 

 be disappointed in Wordsworth's land. — Ever affection- 

 ately yours, John Ruskin. 



Mr. Ruskin had made some whimsically 

 ferocious, or ferociously whimsical, attacks on 

 Sir John's list of best hundred books. Commenc- 

 ing one of two articles in the Pall Mall Gazette, 

 he writes : " Putting my pen lightly through 

 the needless, and blottesquely through the rubbish 

 and poison of Sir John's list, I leave enough for 

 a life's liberal reading, and choice for any true 

 worker's loyal reading ..." and so forth. Mr. 

 Ruskin was keenly antagonistic, moreover, to 

 the scientific views of the school to which Sir 

 John belonged. " I've been made so miserable," 

 he writes to Miss Susan Beever, from C.C.C. 

 Oxford in 1875, " by a paper of J. Lubbock's on 

 Flowers and Insects, that I must come and 

 whine to you. He says, and really as if he 

 knew it, that insects, chiefly bees, entirely 

 originate flowers ; that all scent, colour, pretty 

 form, is owing to bees ; that flowers which insects 



