John Tyrwhitt’s “Christian Art and Symbolism.”  He drew the Apse at Pisa, half-amused and half-worried by the little ragamuffin who varied the tedium of watching his work by doing horizontal-bar tricks on the railings of the Cathedral green.  Then to Lucca, where, to show his friends something of Italian landscape, he took them for rambles through the olive farms and chestnut woods, among which Miss Hilliard lost her jewelled cross.  Greatly to Ruskin’s delight, as a firm believer in Italian peasant-virtue, it was found and returned without hint of reward.

At Rome they visited old Mr. Severn, and then went homeward by way of Verona, where Ruskin wrote an account of the Cavalli monuments for the Arundel society, and Venice, where he returned to the study of Carpaccio.  At Rome he had been once more to the Sistine, and found that on earlier visits the ceiling and the Last Judgment had taken his attention too exclusively.  Now that he could look away from Michelangelo he become conscious of the claims of Botticelli’s frescoes, which represent, in the Florentine school, somewhat the same kind of interest that he had found in Carpaccio.  He became enamoured of Botticelli’s Zipporah, and resolved to study the master more closely.  On reaching home he had to prepare “The Eagle’s Nest” for publication; in the preface he gave special importance to Botticelli, and amplified it in lectures on early engraving, that Autumn;[27] in which I remember his quoting with appreciation the passage on the Venus Anadyomene from Pater’s “Studies in the Renaissance” just published.

[Footnote 27:  “Ariadne Florentina,” delivered on Nov. 2, 9, 16, 23, 30, and Dec. 7, and repeated on the following Thursdays.  Ruskin’s first mention of Botticelli was in the course on Landscape, Lent Term, 1871.]

This sudden enthusiasm about an unknown painter amused the Oxford public:  and it became a standing joke among the profane to ask who was Ruskin’s last great man.  It was in answer to that, and in expression of a truer understanding than most Oxford pupils attained, that Bourdillon of Worcester wrote on “the Ethereal Ruskin,”—­that was Carlyle’s name for him:—­

    “To us this star or that seems bright,
    And oft some headlong meteor’s flight
    Holds for awhile our raptured sight.

    “But he discerns each noble star;
    The least is only the most far,
    Whose worlds, may be, the mightiest are.”

The critical value of this course however, to a student of art-history, is impaired by his using as illustrations of Botticelli, and of the manner of engraving which he took for standard, certain plates which were erroneously attributed to the artist.  “It is strange,” he wrote in despair to Professor Norton, “that I hardly ever get anything stated without some grave mistake, however true in my main discourse.”  But in this case a fate stronger than he had taken him unawares.  The circumstances do not extenuate the error of the Professor, but they explain the difficulties under which his work was done.  The cloud that rested on his own life was the result of a strange and wholly unexpected tragedy in another’s.