no more be the true kings of the nation than gadflies are the kings of a horse; they suck it, and may drive it wild, but do not guide it. They, and their courts, and their armies are, if one could see clearly, only a large species of marsh mosquito, with bayonet proboscis and melodious, band-mastered trumpeting, in the summer air; the twilight being, perhaps, sometimes fairer, but hardly more wholesome, for its glittering mists of midge companies. The true kings, meanwhile, rule quietly, if at all, and hate ruling; too many of them make ‘il gran rifiuto’;60 and if they do not, the mob, as soon as they are likely to become useful to it, is pretty sure to make its ‘gran rifiuto’ of them.

Yet the visible king may also be a true one, some day, if ever day comes when he will estimate his dominion by the force of it,- not the geographical boundaries. It matters very little whether Trent cuts you a cantel out here, or Rhine rounds you a castle less there.61 But it does matter to you, king of men, whether you can verily say to this man, ‘Go’, and he goeth; and to another, ‘Come’, and he cometh. Whether you can turn your people, as you can Trent – and where it is that you bid them come, and where go.62 It matters to you, king of men, whether your people hate you, and die by you, or love you, and live by you. You may measure your dominion by multitudes, better than by miles; and count degrees of love-latitude, not from, but to, a wonderfully warm and infinite equator.63

Measure! – nay, you cannot measure. Who shall measure the difference between the power of those who ‘do and teach’,64 and who are greatest in the kingdoms of earth, as of heaven – and the power of those who undo, and consume -whose power, at the fullest, is only the power of the moth and the rust? Strange! to think how the Moth-kings lay up treasures for the moth; and the Rust-kings, who are to their peoples’ strength as rust to armour, lay up treasures for the rust; and the Robber-kings, treasures for the robber; but how few kings have ever laid up treasures that needed no guarding -treasures of which, the more thieves there were, the better! Broidered robe, only to be rent; helm and sword, only to be dimmed; jewel and gold, only to be scattered;- there have been three kinds of kings who have gathered these. Suppose there ever should arise a Fourth order of kings, who had read, in some obscure writing of long ago, that there was a Fourth kind of treasure, which the jewel and gold could not equal, neither should it be valued with pure gold. A web made fair in the weaving, by Athena’s shuttle; an armour, forged in divine fire by Vulcanian force; a gold to be mined in the very sun’s red heart, where he sets over the Delphian cliffs;- deep-pictured tissue;- impenetrable armour;- potable gold!-65 the three great Angels66 of Conduct, Toil, and Thought, still calling to us, and waiting at the posts of our doors, to lead us, with their winged power, and guide us, with their unerring eyes, by the path which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture’s eye has not seen!67 Suppose kings should ever arise, who heard and believed this word, and at last gathered and brought forth treasures of – Wisdom – for their people?

Think what an amazing business that would be! How inconceivable, in the state of our present national wisdom! That we should bring up our peasants to a book exercise instead of a bayonet exercise!- organise, drill, maintain with pay, and good generalship, armies of thinkers, instead of armies of stabbers!- find national amusement in reading-rooms as well as rifle-grounds; give prizes for a fair shot at a fact, as well as for a leaden splash on a target. What an absurd idea it seems, put fairly in words, that the wealth of the capitalists of civilised nations should ever come to support literature instead of war!
[…]

I hope it will not be long before royal or national libraries will be founded in every considerable city, with a royal series of books in them; the same series in every one of them, chosen books, the best in every kind, prepared for that national series in the most perfect way possible; their text printed all on leaves of equal size, broad of margin, and divided into pleasant volumes, light in the hand, beautiful, and strong, and thorough as examples of binders’ work; and that these great libraries will be accessible to all clean and orderly persons at all times of the day and evening; strict law being enforced for this cleanliness and quietness.

I could shape for you other plans, for art galleries, and for natural history galleries, and for many precious – many, it seems to me, needful – things; but this book plan is the easiest and needfullest, and would prove a considerable tonic to what we call our British constitution, which has fallen dropsical of late, and has an evil thirst, and evil hunger, and wants healthier feeding. You have got its corn laws repealed for it; try if you cannot get corn laws established for it, dealing in a better bread;- bread made of that old enchanted Arabian grain, the Sesame, which opens doors;- doors not of robbers’, but of Kings’, Treasuries.68

This epigraph, which did not appear in the first editions of Sesame and Lilies, casts a supplemental ray of light that not only reaches the last sentence of the lecture (see p. 93) but retrospectively illuminates everything that precedes that sentence. Having given his lecture the symbolic title of ‘Sesame’ (the ‘Sesame’ of the Thousand and One Nights – the magic word which opens the door to the thieves’ cave — as an allegory of reading, which opens for us the door of those treasuries where the most valuable wisdom of men is stored up: books), Ruskin amused himself by taking up the word ‘sesame’ for its own sake and, irrespective of the two meanings it has here (Ali Baba’s ‘Open Sesame’ and reading), insisting on its original meaning (sesame seeds) and further embellishing it with a quotation from Lucian, playing a sort of game with the word by making the original significance appear sharply under the conventional meaning that the word has for the Arabian storyteller and for Ruskin.

In truth, Ruskin thereby raises by a degree the symbolic significance of his title, because the quotation from Lucian reminds us that ‘sesame’ was already deflected from its true meaning in the Thousand and One Nights, thus its meaning as the title of Ruskin’s lecture is as an allegory of allegory. The quotation clearly expresses, at the outset, the three meanings of the word ‘sesame’: reading which opens the gates of wisdom, Ali Baba’s magic word, and the enchanted grain. Thus, from the beginning, Ruskin lays out his three themes and at the end of the lecture he will inextricably blend them together, in the last sentence whose final chord will recall the tones of the opening (the grains of sesame) and take from these three themes – or rather five, the two others being ‘Kings’ Treasuries’ in the symbolic sense of books, and the different Kings with their different kinds of treasuries, a new theme introduced toward the end of the lecture – an extraordinary richness and plenitude.

At various times, Ruskin tried out as many as five epigraphs for the ‘Sesame’ lecture, and if, in the end, he opted for the quotation from Lucian, it was no doubt because, precisely by lying farther from the sentiments of the lecture than the others, it added more, provided more embellishment, and best shed light on the various symbols by rejuvenating the meaning of the word ‘sesame’.

It doubtless also served to bring the treasures of wisdom into line with the charm of a frugal life, and give to his advice for individual wisdom the additional range of maxims on social happiness. This last intention becomes clearer toward the middle of the lecture. But it is precisely the attraction of Ruskin’s work that between the various ideas in a given book, and between the different books, there are connections which he does not make explicit, which he lets appear just barely, for an instant, and which in any case may have been linked together only after the fact but which are never artificial because they are always drawn from the always self-identical substance of his thought. The various but consistent preoccupations of this thought are what give these books a unity more real than the unity of composition, which, it must be said, his books often lack.

I see that in the note I have placed at the end of ‘Of Kings’ Treasuries’, I claimed to have found seven themes in the last sentence. In reality, Ruskin takes all the main ideas – or images – which have come up, somewhat chaotically, during his lecture, and sets them next to each other, mixes them, manipulates them, makes them shine together. That is how he works.

He moves from one idea to the next without any apparent order, but actually the imagination which leads him is following its own deep affinities and imposing a higher logic on him in spite of himself, to such an extent that at the end he finds himself to have obeyed a kind of secret plan, unveiled at the end, that retroactively imposes a kind