copies at a time were asked for, this did not leave much margin.  So it was doubled, by the simple expedient of doubling the price!—­or, to be accurate, raising it to 18s. (carriage paid) for 20s. over the counter.  It was freely prophesied by business men that this would not do:  however, at the end of fifteen years the sixth edition of this work in this form was being sold, in spite of the fact that, five years before, a smaller reprint of the same book had been brought out at 5s., and was then in its fourth edition of 3,000 copies each.

Compared with the enormous sale of sensational novels and school books, this is no great matter; but for a didactic work, offered to the public without advertisement, and in the face of the almost universal opposition of the book-selling trade, it means not only that, as an author, Ruskin had made a secure reputation, but also that he deserved the curious tribute once paid him by the journal of a big modern shop (Compton House, Liverpool) as a “great tradesman.”

CHAPTER III

OXFORD TEACHING (1872-1875)

Early in 1872, after bringing out “Munera Pulveris,” the essays he had written ten years before for Fraser on economy; after getting those street-sweepers to work near the British Museum where he was making studies of animals and Greek sculpture; and after once more addressing the Woolwich cadets, this time[25] on the Bird of Calm (the mythology of the Halcyon), Professor Ruskin went to Oxford to give a course of ten lectures[26] on the Relation of Natural Science to Art, afterwards published under the title of “The Eagle’s Nest.”  He wrote to Professor Norton: 

[Footnote 25:  January 13, 1872.]

[Footnote 26:  Feb. 8, 10, 15, 17, 22, 24. 29; March 2, 7, and 9.]

“I am, as usual, unusually busy.  When I get fairly into my lecture work at Oxford I always find the lecture would come better some other way, just before it is given, and so work from hand to mouth.  I am always unhappy, and see no good in saying so.  But I am settling to my work here—­recklessly—­to do my best with it:  feeling quite sure that it is talking at hazard for what chance good may come.  But I attend regularly in the schools as mere drawing-master, and the men begin to come in one by one, about fifteen or twenty already; several worth having as pupils in any way, being of temper to make good growth of.”

Why was he always unhappy?  It was not that Mr. W.B.  Scott criticised “Ruskin’s influence” in that March; or that by Easter he had to say farewell to his old home on Denmark Hill, and settle “for good” at Brantwood.  Nor that he could go abroad again for a long summer in Italy with Mr. and Mrs. Severn and the Hilliards and Mr. Albert Goodwin.  They started about the middle of April, and on the journey out he wrote, beside his “Fors” which always went on, a preface to the Rev. R. St.