For the Inaugural Course, he was, so to speak, on his best behaviour, guarding against too hasty expression of individuality.  He read careful orations, stating his maturest views on the general theory of art, in picked language, suited to the academic position.  The little volume is not discursive or entertaining, like “Modern Painters,” and contains no pictures either with pen or pencil; but it is crammed full of thought, and of the results of thought.

The Slade Professor was also expected to organise and superintend the teaching of drawing; and his first words in the first lecture expressed the hope that he would be able to introduce some serious study of Art into the University, which, he thought, would be a step towards realising some of his ideals of education.  He had long felt that mere talking about Art was a makeshift, and that no real insight could be got into the subject without actual and practical dealing with it.  He found a South Kensington School in existence at Oxford, with an able master, Mr. Alexander Macdonald; and though he did not entirely approve of the methods in use, tried to make the best of the materials to his hand, accepting but enlarging the scope of the system.  The South Kensington method had been devised for industrial designing, primarily; Ruskin’s desire was to get undergraduates to take up a wider subject, to familiarise themselves with the technical excellences of the great masters, to study nature, and the different processes of art,—­drawing, painting and some forms of decorative work, such as, in especial, goldsmiths’ work, out of which the Florentine school had sprung.  He did not wish to train artists, but, as before in the Working Men’s College, to cultivate the habit of mind that looks at nature and life, not analytically, as science does, but for the sake of external aspect and expression.  By these means he hoped to breed a race of judicious patrons and critics, the best service any man can render to the cause of art.

And so he got together a mass of examples in addition to the Turners which he had already given to the University galleries.  He placed in the school a few pictures by Tintoret, some drawings by Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and Burne-Jones, and a great number of fine casts and engravings.  He arranged a series of studies by himself and others, as “copies,” fitted, like the Turners in the National Gallery, with sliding frames in cabinets for convenient reference and removal.  After spending most of his first Lent Term in this work, he went home for a month to prepare a catalogue, which was published the same year:  the school not being finally opened until October, 1871.  During these first visits to Oxford he was the guest of Sir Henry Acland; on April 29, 1871, Professor Ruskin, already honorary student of Christ Church, was elected to an honorary fellowship at Corpus, and enabled to occupy rooms, vacated by the Rev. Henry Furneaux, who gave up his fellowship on marrying Mr. Arthur Severn’s twin-sister.[22]