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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: perfect circles, and, I regret to say, left the mouth out
altogether, with perfect satisfaction to himself.
May I without offence ask you to consider whether this mode of
arrest in ancient Irish art may not be indicative of points of
character which even yet, in some measure, arrest your national
power? I have seen much of Irish character, and have watched it
closely, for I have also much loved it. And I think the form of
failure to which it is most liable is this,--that being generous-
hearted, and wholly intending always to do right, it does not attend
to the external laws of right, but thinks it must necessarily do
right because it means to do so, and therefore does wrong without
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