[Footnote 22:  His rooms were in Fellows’ buildings, No. 2 staircase, first floor right.]

After this work well begun, he went abroad for a vacation tour with a party of friends—­as in 1866; Lady Trevelyan’s sister, Mrs. Hilliard, to chaperone the same young ladies, and three servants with them.  They started on April 27th; stayed awhile at Meurice’s to see Paris; and at Geneva, to go up the Saleve, twice, in bitter black east wind.  Then across the Simplon to Milan.  After a month at Venice and Verona, where he recurred to his scheme against inundation, then ridiculed by Punch, but afterwards taken up seriously by the Italians, they went to Florence, and met Professor Norton.  In the end of June they turned homewards, by Pisa and Lucca, Milan and Como, and went to visit their friend Marie of the Giessbach.

At the Giessbach they spent a fortnight, enjoying the July weather and glorious walks, in the middle of which war was suddenly declared between Germany and France.  The summons of their German waiter to join his regiment brought the news home to them, as such personal examples do, more than columns of newspaper print; and as hostilities were rapidly beginning, Ruskin, with the gloomiest forebodings for the beautiful country he loved, took his party home straight across France, before the ways should be closed.

August was a month of feverish suspense to everybody; to no one more than to Ruskin, who watched the progress of the armies while he worked day by day at the British Museum preparing lectures for next term.  This was the course on Greek relief-sculpture, published as “Aratra Pentelici."[23] It was a happy thought to illustrate his subject from coins, rather than from disputed and mutilated fragments; and he worked into it his revised theory of the origin of art—­not Schiller’s nor Herbert Spencer’s, and yet akin to theirs of the “Spieltrieb,”—­involving the notion of doll-play;—­man as a child, re-creating himself, in a double sense; imitating the creation of the world and really creating a sort of secondary life in his art, to play with, or to worship.  In the last lecture of the series (published separately) the Professor compared—­as the outcome of classic art in Renaissance times—­Michelangelo and Tintoret, greatly to the disadvantage of Michelangelo.  This heresy against a popular creed served as text for some severe criticism; but as he said in a prefatory note to the pamphlet, readers “must observe that its business is only to point out what is to be blamed in Michael Angelo, and that it assumes the fact of his power to be generally known,” and he referred to Mr. Tyrwhitt’s “Lectures on Christian Art” for the opposite side of the question.

[Footnote 23:  Delivered Nov. 24, 26, Dec. 1, 3, 8 and 10, 1870.]