was going home, I was obliged to give the canals up. I have never recovered the feeling of them.'

6

He then goes on to lament the decay of Venice, the idleness and dissipation of the populace, the lottery gambling; and to forebode the 'destruction of old buildings and erection of new' changing the place into a modern town—a bad imitation of Paris. Better than that he thinks would be utter neglect; St. Mark's Place would again be, what it was in the early ages, a green field, and the front of the Ducal Palace and the marble shafts of St. Mark's would be rooted in wild violets and wreathed with vines. She will be beautiful again then, and I could almost wish that the time might come quickly, were it not that so many noble pictures must be destroyed first. . . . I love Venetian pictures more and more, and wonder at them every day with greater wonder; compared with all other paintings they are so easy, so instinctive, so natural; everything that the men of other schools did by rule and called composition, done here by instinct and only called truth.

'I don't know when I have envied anybody more than I did the other day the directors and clerks of the Zecca. There they sit at inky deal desks, counting out rolls of money, and curiously weighing the irregular and battered coinage of which Venice boasts; and just over their heads, occupying the place which in a London counting-house would be occupied by a commercial almanack, a glorious Bonifazio -Solomon and the Queen of Sheba'; and in a less honourable corner three old directors of the Zecca, very mercantilelooking men indeed, counting money also, like the living ones, only a little more living, painted by Tintoret; not to speak of the scattered Palma Vecchios, and a lovely Benedetto Diana which no one ever looks at. I wonder when the European mind will again awake to the great fact that a noble picture was not painted to be hung, but to be seen? I only saw these by accident, having been detained in Venice by some obliging person who abstracted some [of his wife's jewels] and brought me thereby into various relations with the respectable body of people who live at the wrong end of

the Bridge of Sighs-the police, whom, in spite of traditions of terror, I would very willingly have changed for some of those their predecessors whom you have honoured by a note in the "Italy." The present police appear to act on exactly contrary principles; yours found the purse and banished the loser; these don't find the jewels, and won't let me go away. I am afraid no punishment is appointed in Venetian law for people who steal time.'

Mr. Ruskin returned to England in July 1852, and settled next door to his old home on Herne Hill. He said he could not live any more in Park Street, with a dead brick wall opposite his windows. And so, under the roof where he wrote the first volume of Modern Painters,' he finished 'Stones of Venice.' These later volumes give an account of St. Mark's and the Ducal Palace and other ancient buildings; a complete catalogue of Tintoret's pictures,-the list he had begun in 1845; and a history of the successive styles of architecture, Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance, interweaving illustrations of the human life and character that made the art what it was.

The kernel of the work was the chapter on the Nature of Gothic; in which he showed, more distinctly than in the 'Seven Lamps,' and connected with a wider range of thought, suggested by Pre-Raphaelitism, the great doctrine that art cannot be produced except by artists; that architecture, in so far as it is an art, does not mean mechanical execution, by unintelligent workmen, from the vapid working-drawings of an architect's office; and, just as Socrates postponed the day of justice until philosophers should be kings and kings philosophers, so Ruskin postponed the reign of art until workmen should be artists, and artists workmen.

6

It was no idle dream. The day dawned early when that chapter on the Nature of Gothic' was taken as the manifesto of Maurice and Kingsley's Working Men's College: and surely the sun had risen, when the same words were chosen for his loving adornment by our great art-craftsman, William

CHAPTER VI.

THE EDINBURGH LECTURES. (1853, 1854.)

'Let him go up into the public chair;

We'll hear him.'

Julius Cæsar.

Y the end of July 1853 'Stones of Venice' was finished, as well as a description of Giotto's works at Padua, written for the Arundel Society. The social duties of the season were over; and Mr. Ruskin took a cottage in Glenfinlas, where to spend a well-earned holiday. He invited Mr. Millais, by this time an intimate and heartilyadmired friend,* to go down into Scotland with him for the summer's rest,—such rest as two men of energy and talent take, in the change of scene without giving up the habit of work. Mr. Ruskin devoted himself first to foreground studies, and made careful drawings of rock-detail; and then, being asked to give a course of lectures before the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, he was soon busy writing once more, and preparing the cartoon-sketches, diagrams as he calls them, to illustrate his subjects. Dr. Acland had joined the party; and one day, in the ravine, it is said that he asked Millais to sketch their host as he stood contemplatively on the rocks, with the torrent thundering beside him. The sketch was produced at a sitting; and, with additional

✦ 'What a beauty of a man he is!' wrote old Mr. Ruskin, ‘and high in intellect. .. Millais' sketches are 66 prodigious"! Millais is the painter of the age.' 'Capable, it seems to me, of almost everything, if his life and strength be spared,' said the younger Ruskin to Miss Mitford.

work in the following winter, became the well-known portrait now at Oxford, in the possession of Sir Henry Acland, much the best likeness of this early period.

Another portrait was painted-in words-by one of his audience at Edinburgh on November 1, when he gave the opening lecture of his course, his first appearance on the platform. The account is extracted from the Edinburgh Guardian of November 19, 1853:

'Before you can see the lecturer, however, you must get into the hall, and that is not an easy matter, for, long before the doors are opened, the fortunate holders of season tickets begin to assemble, so that the crowd not only fills the passage, but occupies the pavement in front of the entrance and overflows into the road. At length the doors open, and you are carried through the passage into the hall, where you take up, of course, the best available position for seeing and hearing. After waiting a weary time . . . the door by the side of the platform opens, and a thin gentleman with light hair, a stiff white cravat, dark overcoat with velvet collar, walking, too, with a slight stoop, goes up to the desk, and looking round with a self-possessed and somewhat formal air, proceeds to take off his great-coat, revealing thereby, in addition to the orthodox white cravat, the most orthodox of white waistcoats. ... “Dark hair, pale face, and massive marble brow-that is my ideal of Mr. Ruskin,” said a young lady near us. This proved to be quite a fancy portrait, as unlike the reality as could well be imagined. Mr. Ruskin has light sand-coloured hair; his face is more red than pale; the mouth well cut, with a good deal of decision in its curve, though somewhat wanting in sustained dignity and strength; an aquiline nose; his forehead by no means broad or massive, but the brows full and well bound together; the eye we could not see, in consequence of the shadows that fell upon his countenance from the lights overhead, but we are sure that the poetry and passion we looked for almost in vain in other features must be concentrated there.

Mary Russell Mitford found him as a young man very eloquent and distinguished-looking, tall, fair, and slender, with a gentle play

After sitting for a moment or two, and glancing round at the sheets on the wall as he takes off his gloves, he rises, and leaning slightly over the desk, with his hands folded across, begins at once,-"You are proud of your good city of Edinburgh," etc.

And now for the style of the lecture. Properly speaking, there were two styles essentially distinct, and not well blended, -a speaking and a writing style; the former colloquial and spoken off-hand; the latter rhetorical and carefully read in quite a different voice,-we had almost said intoned. . . . His elocution is peculiar; he has a difficulty in sounding the letter “r”; and there is a peculiar tone in the rising and falling of his voice at measured intervals, in a way scarcely ever heard, except in the public lection of the service appointed to be read in churches. These are the two things with which, perhaps, you are most surprised, his dress and manner of speaking-both of which (the white waistcoat notwithstanding) are eminently clerical. You naturally expect, in one so independent, a manner free from conventional restraint, and an utterance, whatever may be the power of voice, at least expressive of a strong individuality; and you find instead a Christ Church man of ten years' standing, who has not yet taken orders; his dress and manner derived from his college tutor, and his elocution from the chapelreader.'

The lectures were a summing up, in popular form, of the chief topics of Mr. Ruskin's thought during the last two years. The first stated, with more decision and warmth than part of his audience approved, his plea for the Gothic fulness, and a sort of pretty way wardness that was quite charming." Sydney Dobell, again, in 1852, discovered an earnestness pervading every feature, giving power to a face that otherwise would be merely lovable for its gentleness. And, finally, one who visited him at Denmark Hill characterized him as emotional and nervous, with a soft, genial eye, a mouth "thin and severe," and a voice that, though rich and sweet, yet had a tendency to sink into a plaintive and hopeless tone. This is interesting enough, of course, but after all the man is in his books, not in his person.'-Literary World, May 19, 1893.