All through that year he remained at home, except for short necessary visits, and frequent evenings with Carlyle.  And when, in December, he gave those lectures in Manchester which afterwards, as “Sesame and Lilies,” became his most popular work, we can trace his better health of mind and body in the brighter tone of his thought.  We can hear the echo of Carlyle’s talk in the heroic, aristocratic, Stoic ideals, and in the insistence on the value of books and free public libraries,[10]—­Carlyle being the founder of the London Library.  And we may suspect that his thoughts on women’s influence and education had been not a little directed by those months in the company of “the dear old lady and ditto young” to whom Carlyle used to send his love.

[Footnote 10:  The first lecture, “Of Kings’ Treasuries,” was given, December 6th, 1864, at Rusholme Town Hall, Manchester, in aid of a library fund for the Rusholme Institute.  The second, “Queens’ Gardens,” was given December 14th, at the Town Hall, King Street, now the Free Reference Library, Manchester, in aid of schools for Ancoats.]

In 1864 a new series of papers on Art was begun, the only published work upon Art of all these ten years.  The papers ran in The Art Journal from January to July, 1865, and from January to April. 1866, under the title of “The Cestus of Aglaia,” by which was meant the Girdle, or restraining law, of Beauty, as personified in the wife of Hephaestus, “the Lord of Labour.”  Their intention was to suggest, and to evoke by correspondence, “some laws for present practice of art in our schools, which may be admitted, if not with absolute, at least with a sufficient consent, by leading artists.”  As a first step the author asked for the elementary rules of drawing.  For his own contribution he showed the value of the “pure line,” such as he had used in his own early drawings.  Later on, he had adopted a looser and more picturesque style of handling the point; and in the “Elements of Drawing” he had taught his readers to take Rembrandt’s etchings as exemplary.  But now he felt that this “evasive” manner, as he called it, had its dangers.  And so these papers attempted to supersede the amateurish object lesson of the earlier work by stricter rules for a severer style; prematurely, as it proved, for the chapters came to an end before the promised code was formulated.  The same work was taken up again in “The Laws of Fesole”; but the use of the pure line, which Ruskin’s precepts failed to enforce, was, in the end, taught to the public by the charming practice of Mr. Walter Crane and Miss Greenaway.

A lecture at the Camberwell Working Men’s Institute on “Work and Play” was given on January 24th, 1865; which, as it was printed in “The Crown of Wild Olive,” we will notice further on.  Various letters and papers on political and social economy and other subjects hardly call for separate notice:  with the exception of one very important address to the Royal Institution of British Architects, given May 15th, “On the Study of Architecture in our Schools.”