“It is a long while since I’ve felt so good-for-nothing as I do this morning.  My very wristbands curl up in a dog’s-eared and disconsolate manner; my little room is all a heap of disorder.  I’ve got a hoarseness and wheezing and sneezing and coughing and choking.  I can’t speak and I can’t think; I’m miserable in bed and useless out of it; and it seems to me as if I could never venture to open a window or go out of a door any more.  I have the dimmest sort of diabolical pleasure in thinking how miserable I shall make Susie by telling her all this; but in other respects I seem entirely devoid of all moral sentiments.  I have arrived at this state of things, first by catching cold, and since trying to ’amuse myself’ for three days.”

He goes on to give a list of his amusements—­Pickwick, chivalric romances, the Daily Telegraph, Staunton’s games of chess, and finally analysis of the Dock Company’s bill of charges on a box from Venice.

Ten days after he wrote from Oxford, in his whimsical style: 

“Yesterday I had two lovely services in my own cathedral.  You know the Cathedral of Oxford is the chapel of Christ Church College, and I have my high seat in the chancel, as an honorary student, besides being bred there, and so one is ever so proud and ever so pious all at once, which is ever so nice you know:  and my own dean, that’s the Dean of Christ Church, who is as big as any bishop, read the services, and the psalms and anthems were lovely; and then I dined with Henry Acland and his family ... but I do wish I could be at Brantwood too.”  Next day it was “Cold quite gone.”

But he was not to be quit so easily this time of the results of overwork and worry.

He had been passing through the unpleasant experience of a misunderstanding with one of his most trusted friends and helpers.  His work on behalf of the St. George’s Guild had been energetic and sincere:  and he had received the support of a number of strangers, among whom were people of responsible station and position.  But he was surprised to find that many of his personal friends held aloof.  He was still more surprised to learn, on returning from Venice, full of new hope and stronger convictions in his mission, that the caution of one upon whom he had counted as a firm ally had dissuaded an intending adherent from joining in the work.  A man of the world, accustomed to overreach and to be overreached, would have taken the discovery coolly, and accepted an explanation.  But Ruskin was never a man of the world; and now, much less than ever.  He took it as treason to the great work of which he felt himself to be the missionary.  Throughout the autumn and winter the discovery rankled, and preyed on his mind.  As for the sake of absolute candour he had published in “Fors” everything that related to the Guild work,—­even his own private affairs and confessions, whatever they risked,—­he felt that this too must out; in order that his supporters might judge of his conduct and that nothing affecting the enterprise might be kept back.  And so, at Christmas, he sent the correspondence to his printers.