particularly!" Among the pleasant things were sketching at the National Gallery, "going to all manner of wicked plays and pantomimes," and listening to music from Miss Mary Gladstone. But the music did not relax the strain, and in March Ruskin was smitten with a third and a very severe attack of brain-fever.

Ruskin was attended through this illness by Sir William Gull, who paid him the compliment, in acknowledging the patient's fee, of preferring to keep the cheque as an autograph. Though the attack was severe, Ruskin again recovered quickly, and by April, as will be seen from his correspondence in a later volume, he was chatting to his friends as brightly and cheerily as ever. To his friend and assistant Mr. Collingwood he wrote from Herne Hill:

"(Easter Monday.)-The moment I got your letter to-day recommending me not to write books (I finished it, however, with great enjoyment of the picnic, before proceeding to act in defiance of the rest), I took out the last proof of last Proserpina and worked for an hour and a half on it; and I have been translating some St. Benedict material since-with much comfort and sense of getting, as I said, head to sea again-(have you seen the article on modern rudders in the Telegraph? Anyhow, I'll send you a lot of collision and other interesting sea-subjects by to-morrow's post). This is only to answer the catechism.

"Love and congratulations to the boys. Salute Tommy for me in an affectionate-and apostolic-manner,—especially since he carried up the lunch! Also, kindest regards to all the other servants. I daresay they're beginning really to miss me a little by this time.

"What state are the oxalises in-anemones? WHY can't we invent seeing, instead of talking, by telegraph?

"I've just got a topaz of which these are two contiguous planes! [sketch] traced as it lies-and the smaller plane is blindingly iridescent in sunshine and rainbow colours! I've only found out this in Easter Sunday light." 3

Ruskin's physician had ordered change of air and foreign travel, but he stayed on for some months yet at Herne Hill-busying himself with the May-day Festival at Whitelands College, with the parts of Proserpina aforesaid, and with the purchase of minerals for Sheffield

Letter given by W. G. Collingwood in his Life and Work of John Ruskin, 1900, p. 362. 2 See, in a later volume, a letter to the Rev. J. P. Faunthorpe of February 9, 1882.

3 From W. G. Collingwood's Life and Work of John Ruskin, 1900, p. 363.

and his other collections. But in the end he obeyed the doctor. To Mr. Collingwood, who was to be his travelling companion, he wrote:

"I was not at all sure, myself, till yesterday, whether I would go abroad; also I should have told you before. But as you have had the (sorrowful?) news broken to you-and as I find Sir William Gull perfectly fixed in his opinion-I obey him, and reserve only some liberty of choice to myself-respecting, not only climate, but the general appearance of the inhabitants of the localities where, for antiquarian or scientific research, I may be induced to prolong my sojourn. Meantime I send you to show you I haven't come to town for nothing-my last bargain in beryls, with a little topaz besides."1

II

The doctor's prescription was happily inspired, for the tour, which lasted four months, gave Ruskin a new lease of health and strength. In August Ruskin set out with Mr. Collingwood upon a holidayjourney of the kind that the judiciously experienced traveller accounts the best: it included familiar scenes (as will be seen in the itinerary here subjoined 2), yet broke also some new ground. Ruskin's travelling companion has written an account of their journey in a chapter which he calls "Ruskin's Old Road." The title is happy, for Ruskin, it seems, had already Præterita in contemplation, and it was one object of his tour to revisit the scenes and revive the memories of old days. More particularly, he drove once more, as in the old posting-days, through the Jura to Geneva-stopping at Champagnole, where the Hotel de la Poste used to be "a kind of home to us.' 994 "I never thought to date from this dear place more," he says in his diary

1 Life and Work of John Ruskin, 1900, p. 363.

* Calais (August 10), Laon (August 12), Rheims (August 15), Troyes (August 17), Sens (August 18), Avallon (August 19), Dijon (September 1), Champagnole (September 2), St. Cergues (September 5), Geneva (September 8), Sallenches (September 9), Geneva (September 15), Annecy (September 16), Chambéry (September 20), Turin (September 21), Genoa (September 23), Pisa (September 25), Lucca (September 29), Florence (October 4), Lucca (October 11), Florence (October 27), Lucca (October 30), Pisa (November 1), Turin (November 10), Aix-les-Bains (November 11), Annecy (November 12), Talloires (November 14), Annecy (November 22), Geneva (November 24), Dijon (November 27), Paris (November 28), Boulogne (November 30), Folkestone (December 1), Herne Hill (December 2).

And in two following chapters, entitled "Ruskin's 'Cashbook and "Ruskin's Ilaria." The three chapters occupy pp. 47-104 of Ruskin Relics, 1903. In writing them, Mr. Collingwood had access to Ruskin's Diary (the "Cashbook"), from which he made numerous extracts; these, with many others, are embodied in the present Introduction.

Præterita, i. § 189.

(September 3), "and I am here in, for my age, very perfect health so far as I feel or know, and was very thankful on my mother's birthday to kneel down once more on the rocks of Jura." Many an old memory came back to him. "How eager he was," writes his companion, “and how delighted with this open upland! By-and-by we came to a wood. He cast about a little for the way through the trees, then bade me notice that the flowers of spring were gone: 'you ought to have seen the wood-anemones, oxalis, and violets'; and then, picking his steps to find the exact spot by the twisted larch tree, and gripping my arm to hold me back on the brink of the abyss, That's where the hawk sailed off the crag, in one of my old books; do you remember?'" At Sallenches it was one of the pleasures of the tour to take his friend to favourite sights and scenes. He thus showed "Norton's glen," so called in memory of happy walks in former years; and at Talloires, on the lake of Annecy, he was "proud of leading the way down the steep mountain-tracks, well known to him, in the dark after long walks." The friend gave as much pleasure as he received. It was on this tour that Mr. Collingwood made the geological observations recorded in his Limestone Alps of Savoy, and that Ruskin found, as he says in his Introduction to that book, that his friend's "instinct for the lines expressive of the action of the beds was far more detective than my own."2 Ruskin's pleasure at Mornex in finding himself remembered and in meeting old friends has been told already, in connexion with his long sojourn there twenty years before. He even revived his old schemes for finding a hermitage for himself among the Savoy mountains. The Hotel du Mont Blanc at St. Martin's, where he had stayed so often in earlier years, as told in the chapter of Præterita to which the place gives its title, was now deserted and for sale, and he records in the diary an idea of buying it:

"SALLENCHES, September 13.-Fresh snow on the Varens, and the swallows congregated along the cornices opposite, as I must try to draw; after noticing first the plan formed last night, as the stream kept me waking, to buy the old inn at St. Martin's now left desolate. It seems to me that the colour of the last days I spent there, and my getting the two Turner pencil sketches of it, the Cross on the bridge, and the lessons I have had, during all my life, point to this as right. Collingwood's poem, read last night, not without its meaning."

1 See Seven Lamps, ch. vi. § 1 (Vol. VIII. p. 223).

2 Vol. XXVI. p. 571.

3 See Vol. XVII. p. lviii.

4 At Brantwood.

"I had made some verses about the place," Mr. Collingwood explains, "rather on the lines his talk had suggested, but ending with more optimism. . . . A little later there came a letter addressed to 'MM. Ruskin et Collingwood.' 'Quite like a firm,' he said; 'I wonder what they think we're travelling in; but I hope we'll always be partners.' The terms of the offer I forget, but they did not seem practicable, or Coniston might have known him no more." Later in the tour, in Italy, Ruskin revisited another of the places which had greatly influenced him, and which, like St. Martin's, gives title to a chapter of his autobiography:—

"Here once more," he wrote at Pisa (September 26), “where I began all my true work in 1845. Thirty-seven full years of ithow much in vain! How much strength left I know not-but yet trust the end may be better than the beginning.”

It was, then, on the Old Road that Ruskin now travelled. The road was the same, but the traveller was old, instead of young, and in the external conditions around him Ruskin noticed a great and a melancholy change. Here, too, this was the "Storm Cloud." The diary is again heavy with it, and a record, included in his lectures of 1884, was written during this tour.1

Ruskin had a second object in this tour besides renewing impressions of his earlier life. He was at the time devoting much thought, as we have seen in an earlier Introduction,2 to his museum. He had been at Sheffield in July, and the prospect of a new building seemed favourable. He had artists working for him in France and Italy; Mr. Collingwood, his companion and private secretary, was also one of his helpers in this respect; he desired to select subjects for them to record and to take the opportunity of meeting some of them on the spot. We shall find many notes of these different interests in the account of his tour.

Calais tower, we are told, roused none of the old enthusiasm; he said rather bitterly, "I wonder how I came to write about it." But as soon as he set to work, his interest in the place revived; and he notes that "only this moment," in sketching the tracery of the Hotel de Ville, had he "found the laws of it": the scheme of the decoration is sketched in the diary. At Laon he writes: "All beautiful round me and I feeling as able for my work as ever" (August 12) Early in the morning he began a drawing of the cathedral front, 1 See The Storm-Cloud, § 79 (Vol. XXXIV. p. 70). 2 Vol. XXX. p. xlvii.

XXXIII.

which he finished on Monday before leaving. "It was always rather wonderful," says Mr. Collingwood, "how he would make use of every moment, even when ill-health and the fatigue of travelling might seem a good reason for idling. At once on arriving anywhere he was ready to sketch, and up to the minute of departure he went on with his drawing unperturbed. In the afternoons he usually dropped the harder work of the morning, and went for a ramble out into the country; at Laon the hayfields and pear orchards south of the town gave him, it seemed, just as much pleasure as Chamouni."

At Rheims, his earliest impressions came back to him; he still, as in his rhymed tour of 1835, found "very little in it to admire": 1

66

5 August 15.-Here nothing but disgusts and disappointments, even to thirteenth-century windows of cathedral, which are entirely grotesque and frightful in design, though glorious in colour [sketches], and the shafts and vaultings are the worst I ever saw of the time; the arches of the nave meagre and springless, the apse only threesided instead of five, and its double buttresses instead of single, arch a mass of weakness and confusion. The towers more and more are like confectioners' Gothic to me; nor have I ever seen so large a building look so small at the ends of the streets."

"(August 16.)—I cannot find ugly words enough to describe the building now set on the north side of the west end of the cathedral, a narrow street between. It is a sort of pale-faced Newgate, or penitentiary, with square windows iron-grilled in a vile thin way in second storey, and as Fig. 5 [sketch] on the ground one. The barren, bleak Roman-cemented stupidity of soul and sense that it speaks for -set against the old work-kills the old also, and shows all its contrasted follies-what over-richness and vain labour are in it shown more violently by the blankness and brutal inertia of the neighbour building. I can't do the iron grating, ugly enough [sketch].-It is the prison! Prison, side by side with Cathedral. So our Penitentiary opposite Lambeth." 2

At Châlons, Ruskin found the church of Notre Dame "one of the most perfect examples of pure early vaulting." At Troyes, he sketched St. Urbain, which he found "of extreme interest." He noted also "the church of the Madeleine for a quite defaced Norman door of grandest school, approaching Italian; but with the English dog-tooth on its inner order moulding, and the basic colonnade of the north porch of

1 Vol. II. p. 401.

2 Millbank, now pulled down and replaced by the Tate Gallery: compare Vol. XIX. p. 227.

3 Compare Val d'Arno, § 174 (Vol. XXIII. p. 106).