An English welcome to an English shore Such as we could, some four years since we gave thee, Not knowing what the Fates reserved in store Or that our land among our sons would have thee; But now thou art endenizen’d awhile Almost we fear our welcome to renew:[11] Lest what we seemed to promise, should beguile, When all we are is open to thy view. But yet if aught of what we fondly boast— True-hearted warmth of Friendship, frank and free, Survive yet in this island-circling coast, We need not fear again to welcome thee:— So may we, blessing thee, ourselves be blest, And prove not all unworthy of our guest. What happy days, what happy evenings we spent together lang syne! How patient they all were with their German guest when he first tried in his broken English to take part in their lively and sparkling conversations. Having once been received in that delightful circle, it was easy to make more acquaintances among their friends who lived at Oxford, or who from time to time came to visit them at Oxford. It was thus that I first came to know Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, and others. Ruskin often came to spend a few days with his old friends, and uncompromising and severe as he could be when he wielded his pen, he was always most charming in conversation. He never, when he was with his friends, claimed the right of speaking with authority, even on his own special subjects, as he might well have done. It seemed to be his pen that made him say bitter things. He must have been sorry himself for the severe censure he passed in his earlier years on men whose honest labour, if nothing else, ought to have protected them against such cruel onslaughts. Grote’s style may not be the very best for an historian, but in his _Quellenstudium_ he was surely most conscientious. Yet this is what Ruskin wrote of him: “There is probably no commercial establishment between Charing Cross and the Bank, whose head clerk could not have written a better History of Greece, if he had the vanity to waste his time on it.” Of Gibbon’s classical work he spoke with even greater contempt. “Gibbon’s is the worst English ever written by an educated Englishman. Having no imagination and little logic, he is alike incapable either of picturesqueness or wit, his epithets are malicious without point, sonorous without weight, and have no office but to make a flat sentence turgid.” I feel sure that Ruskin, such as I knew him in later years, would have wished these sentences unwritten.