DEAR MALLESON,--It will be many a day before I recover yet--if ever--but with caution I hope not to go wild again, and to get what power belongs to my age slowly back. When were you in the same sort of danger? Let me very strongly warn you from the whirlpool edge--the going down in the middle is gloomier than I can tell you. But I shall thankfully see you and your friend here. Visiting is out of the question for me. I can bear no fatigue nor excitement away from my home. I pay visits no more--anywhere (even in old times few). It is always a great gladness to me when young students care about old books--and I remember as a duty the feeling I used to have in getting a Missal, even after I was past a good many other pleasures. You made such good use of that book too, that I am happy in yielding to any wish of yours about it, so your young friend[37] shall have it if he likes. The marked price is quite a fair market one for it, though you might look and wait long before such a book came _into_ the market. The British Museum people were hastily and superciliously wrong in calling it a common book. It is not a _showy_ one; but there are few more interesting or more perfect service books in English manuscript, and the Museum people buy cart-loads of big folios that are not worth the shelf room. Ever affectionately yours, J. RUSKIN. [37] Rev. J. R. Haslam, now Vicar of Thwaites, Cumberland. See Appendix.--ED. 42. _April 23rd, 1881._ MY DEAR MALLESON,--These passages of description and illustration of the general aspect of Ephesus in St. Paul's time seem to me much more forcibly and artistically written than anything you did in the "Life of Christ"; and I could not suggest any changes to you which you could now carry out under the conditions of time to revise, except a more clear statement of the Ephesian goddess. [I really do not think Mr. Ruskin would wish that _all_ he wrote in the next sentence about the Ephesian Diana should be placed before the public eye. But I resume in the middle of a sentence.] ... practically at last and chiefly of the Diabolic Suction of the Usurer; and her temple, which you luckily liken to the Bank of England, was in fact what that establishment would be as the recognised place of pious pilgrimage for all Jews, infidels, or prostitutes in the realm of England. You could not conceive the real facts of these degraded worships of the mixed Greek and Asiatic races, unless you gave a good year's work to the study of the decline of Greek art in the 3rd and 4th centuries B.C.