2. Then I should like to assure you that the feeling which called forth my first letter also produced the rest, and no one who knows me well would think of attributing to me ‘supreme confidence and comfort.’ Moreover, I have throughout spoken for myself alone, and have not for one moment pretended to be the ‘accredited champion’ of any one. So that if you can spare the latter part of paragraph (e), beginning with ‘Finally,’ I think neither you nor I would lose anything by the omission. Other parts of your comment I am sorry for, but I have not the same reason to object to them as I have to those I have specified. “I am most faithfully yours, “Edward Z. Lyttel.” Some slips of newspaper have been forwarded to me, containing an abstract of a sermon by the Bishop of Manchester, in which some reference was made to ‘Fors’: but of course I cannot take any notice of expressions thus accidentally conveyed to me, and probably reported with inaccuracy. The postscript to the following interesting letter of Mr. Sillar’s may perhaps receive from the Bishop of Manchester more honourable attention:— “Kingswood Lodge, Lee Green, S.E., 13th January, 1875. “My dear Mr. Ruskin,—I have great sympathy with your lady correspondent, and, for the life of me, I cannot tell what you would have me to do. I am not a landed proprietor, nor a country gentleman, though I am the son of one, a retired physician, and brought up in the blessed green fields, and among streams that were as clear as crystal, and full of trout; but coal-pits appeared on the horizon, and gradually drove us out. I well remember the first vile red shaft that appeared within about a mile of our windows, and how the beastly smoke reconciled my mother to leave one of the loveliest country seats in Lancashire, which she had adorned with roses and laurels, I was going to say with her own hands, and I am not sure that it would be wrong to say so, for she saw every one (and the grounds were seven or eight acres in extent) planted with her own eyes, and superintended the doing of it. “Living there in the country, and under a tutor, my education has not been that of an ordinary country gentleman; I early learned to work with my hands as well as with my head, and though I must confess that personally I never had much taste for gardening, I had plenty of work to do in the open air. You tell me our education has to begin—yours as well as mine; and expect me to say that I cannot make a brick or a tile, or build a rude dwelling. Singularly enough, I helped to do so when a boy, and it will be long before any of us forget the miniature cottage we built, and thatched, complete, with window, door, and fireplace, and with a cellar moreover, with wine of our own making, and beer of our own brewing made from treacle; for we did everything ourselves, even to grooming our own ponies.