BOOK IV. PROFESSOR AND PROPHET. (1870-1899.) 'Essa è la luce eterna di Sigieri, DANTE, Parad., x. 138 ΟΝ CHAPTER L FIRST OXFORD LECTURES. (1870-1871.) 'Cannot we hire some Abelard to lecture to us?' THOREAU, Walden. N Tuesday, 8th February, 1870, the Slade Professor's lecture-room was crowded to overflowing with members of the University, old and young, and their friends, who flocked to hear, and to see, the author of 'Modern Painters.' The place was densely packed long before the time; the ante-rooms were filled with personal friends of Mr. Ruskin, hoping for some corner to be found them at the eleventh hour; the doors were blocked open, and besieged outside by a disappointed multitude. Professorial lectures are not usually matters of great excitement: it does not often happen that the accommodation is found inadequate. After some hasty arrangements Sir Henry Acland pushed his way to the table, announced that it was impossible for the lecture to be held in that place, and begged the audience to adjourn to the Sheldonian Theatre. At last, welcomed by all Oxford, the Slade Professor appeared, to deliver his inaugural address. Those earlier courses are still fresh in the memory of many a young hearer who has forgotten, in the stress of busy life, nuch else of what he saw and learned at Oxford, twenty years ago. We undergraduates used to run out to the Museum or to the Drawing School, where the lectures were given, in a scrambling hurry from our Ethics or Prose Class, or of an afternoon leaving the hasty luncheon,-and giving up the river-grumbling at the awkward hours which, as the Professor often told us, he could never arrange to suit everybody. And when we reached the place it was to find half the seats taken by earlier comers, whose broad hats, then in the fashion, were completely in the way of seeing the lecturer and the illustrations he had brought. But still we went, crowds of us; for there was always something to interest, and a dim sense that it was an opportunity which might soon be lost, of hearing one that spoke with authority, and not as the dons.* It was not strictly academic, the way he used to come in, with a little following of familiars and assistants,—exchange recognition with friends in the audience, arrange the objects he had brought to show,-fling off his long-sleeved Master's gown, and plunge into his discourse. His manner of delivery had not altered much since the time of the Edinburgh Lectures. He used to begin by reading, in his curious intonation, the carefully-written passages of rhetoric, which usually occupied only about the half of his hour. By-and-by he would break off, and with quite another air extemporise the liveliest interpolations, describing his diagrams or specimens, restating his arguments, re-enforcing his appeal. His voice, till then artificially cadenced, suddenly became vivacious; his gestures, at first constrained, became dramatic. He used to act his subject, apparently without premeditated art, in the liveliest pantomime. He had no power of voice-mimicry, and none of the ordinary gifts of the actor. A tall and slim figure, not yet shortened from its five feet ten or eleven by the habitual stoop, which ten years later brought him down to less than middle height; a stiff, blue frock-coat; prominent, half-starched wristbands, and tall collars of the Gladstonian type; and the bright blue stock which every one knows for his heraldic bearing: no rings or gewgaws, but a long thin gold chain to his watch :-a plain old-English The inaugural course was given Feb. 8, 16, 23; March 3, 9, 16 and 23, 1870. gentleman, neither fashionable bourgeois nor artistic mountebank. But he gave himself over to his subject with such unreserved intensity of imaginative power, he felt so vividly and spoke so from the heart, that he became whatever he talked about, never heeding his professorial dignity, and never doubting the sympathy of his audience. Lecturing on birds, he strutted like the chough, made himself wings like the swallow; he was for the moment a cat, in explaining that engraving was the art of scratching. If it had been an affectation of theatric display, we 'emancipated school-boys," as the Master of University used to call us, would have seen through it at once, and scorned him. But it was so evidently the expression of his intense eagerness for his subject, so palpably true to his purpose, and he so carried his hearers with him, that one saw in the grotesque of the performance only the guarantee of sincerity. If one wanted more proof of that, there was his face, still young-looking and beardless; made for expression, and sensitive to every change of emotion. A long head, with enormous capacity of brain, veiled by thick wavy hair, not affectedly lengthy but as abundant as ever, and darkened into a deep brown, without a trace of grey; and short light whiskers growing high over his cheeks. A forehead not on the model of the heroic type, but as if the sculptor had heaped his clay in handfuls over the eyebrows, and then heaped more. A big nose, aquiline, and broad at the base, with great thoroughbred nostrils and the 'septum' between them thin and deeply depressed; and there was a turn down at the corners of the mouth, and a breadth of lower lip, that reminded one of his Verona griffin, half eagle, half lion; Scotch in original type, and suggesting a side to his character not all milk and roses. And under shaggy eyebrows, ever so far behind-κaτnpepeis-the fieriest blue eyes, that changed with changing expression, from grave to gay, from lively to severe; that riveted you, magnetised you, seemed to look through you and read your soul; and indeed, when they |