ABSTRACT
A notable example of this latter sort was not long since (in his Fors Clavigera) selected and chastised by Mr. Ruskin himself with a few strokes of such a lash as might thenceforward, one would think, have secured silence at least, if neither penitence nor shame, on the part of the offender. This person, whose abuse of Mr. Carlyle he justly described as matchless ‘in its platitudinous obliquity’,1 was cited by the name of one Buchanan-
but whether by his right name or another, who shall say? for the god of song himself had not more names or addresses. Now yachting among the Scottish (not English) Hebrides;1 now wrestling with fleshly sin (like his countryman Holy Willie)2 in ‘a
great city of civilization’; now absorbed in studious emulation of the Persœ of Æschylus or the ‘enormously fine’ work of ‘the tremendous creature’ Dante;3 now descending from the familiar heights of men whose praise he knows so well how to sing, for the not less noble purpose of crushing a school of poetic sensualists whose works are ‘wearing to the brain’; now ‘walking down the streets’ and watching ‘harlots stare from the shop-windows’, while ‘in the broad day a dozen hands offer him indecent prints’; now ‘beguiling many an hour, when snug at anchor in some lovely Highland loch, with the inimitable, yet questionable, pictures of Parisian life left by Paul de Kock’; landsman and seaman, Londoner and Scotchman, Delian and Patarene Buchanan.4 How should one address him?
