Two of the lectures on birds were repeated at Eton[30] before the boys’ Literary and Scientific Society and their friends; and between this and 1880 Ruskin often went to address the same audience, with the same interest in young people that had taken him in earlier years to Woolwich.

[Footnote 30:  May 10 and 17.]

After a long vacation at Brantwood, the first spent there, he went up to give his course on Early Tuscan Art ("Val d’Arno")[31].  The lectures were printed separately and sold at the conclusion and the first numbers were sent to Carlyle, whose unabated interest in his friend’s work was shown in his letter of Oct. 31st:  “Perge, perge;—­and, as the Irish say, ‘more power to your elbow!’ I have yet read this ‘Val d’Arno’ only once.  Froude snatched it away from me yesterday; and it has then to go to my brother at Dumfries.  After that I shall have it back....”

[Footnote 31:  On Mondays and Thursdays, Oct. 21, 23, 27, 30, Nov. 3, 6, 10, 13, 17, 20; repeated on the Wednesdays and Fridays following.]

During that summer and autumn Ruskin suffered from nights of sleeplessness or unnaturally vivid dreams and days of unrest and feverish energy, alternating with intense fatigue.  The eighteen lectures in less than six weeks, a “combination of prophecy and play-acting,” as Carlyle had called it in his own case, and the unfortunate discussion with an old-fashioned economist who undertook to demolish Ruskinism without understanding it, added to the causes of which we are already aware, brought him to New Year, 1874, in “failing strength, care, and hope.”  He sought quiet at the seaside, but found modern hotel-life intolerable; he went back to town and tried the pantomimes for distraction,—­saw Kate Vaughan in Cinderella, and Violet Cameron in Jack in the Box, over and over again, and found himself: 

“Now hopelessly a man of the world!—­of that woeful outside one, I mean.  It is now Sunday; half-past eleven in the morning.  Everybody else is gone to church—­and I am left alone with the cat, in the world of sin.”

Thinking himself better, he went to Oxford, and announced a course on Alpine form; but after a week was obliged to retreat and go home to Coniston, still hoping to return and give his lectures.  But it was no use.  The gloom without deepened the gloom within; and he took the wisest course in trying Italy, alone this time with his old servant Crawley.

The greater part of 1874 was spent abroad—­first travelling through Savoy and by the Riviera to Assisi, where he wrote to Miss S. Beever: