nd Triumph of Death in the Campo Santo to be the sternest
lessons written on the walls of Tuscany, and worth more study alone
than English travelers usually give to Pisa, Lucca, Pistoja, and
Florence altogether."

(14) P. 468. "_The Gothic style for churches never took root in
Venice._" "Not quite correct. The Ducal Palace traceries are shown
in the 'Stones of Venice' (vol. ii.) to have been founded on those
of the Frari."

(15) P. 471. Mantegna. "_No feeling had he for vital beauty of
human face, or the lower creatures of the earth._" To this Miss
Owen adds in a note, "Professor Ruskin reminds me to notice here,
in qualification, Mantegna's power of painting inanimate forms, as,
_e. g._, in the trees and leaves of his Madonna of the National
Gallery. 'He is,' says Professor Ruskin, 'the most wonderful
leaf-painter of Lombardy.'"

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 17: Preface to the above-named book by Miss A. C. Owen, edited
by Mr. Ruskin. London: Mozley & Smith, 1876.--ED.]

[Footnote 18: _The Monthly Packet._--ED.]

THE EXTENSION OF RAILWAYS IN THE LAKE DISTRICT.[19]

A PROTEST.

261. The evidence collected in the following pages, in support of their
pleading, is so complete, and the summary of his cause given with so
temperate mastery by Mr. Somervell, that I find nothing to add in
circumstance, and little to re-enforce in argument. And I have less
heart to the writing even of what brief preface so good work might by
its author's courtesy be permitted to receive from me, occupied as I so
long have been in efforts tending in the same direction, because, on
that very account, I am far less interested than my friend in this local
and limited resistance to the elsewhere fatally victorious current of
modern folly, cruelty, and ruin. When the frenzy of avarice is daily
drowning our sailors, suffocating our miners, poisoning our children,
and blasting the cultivable surface of England into a treeless waste of
ashes,[20] what does it really matter whether a flock of sheep, more or
less, be driven from the slopes of Helvellyn, or the little pool of
Thirlmere filled with shale, or a few wild blossoms of St. John's vale
lost to the coronal of English spring? Little to anyone; and--let me say
this, at least, in the outset of all saying--_nothing_ to _me_. No one
need charge me with selfishness in any word or action for defense of
these mossy hills. I