Years afterwards, by the intervention of friends, this breach was healed:  but what suffering it cost can be learnt from the sequel.  To Ruskin it was the beginning of the end.  His Aberdeen correspondent asked just then for the usual Christmas message to the Bible class:  and instead of the cheery words of bygone years, received the couplet from Horace: 

    “Inter spem curamque, timores inter et iras,
    Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum.”

    “Amid hope and sorrow, amid fear and wrath, believe
    every day that has dawned on thee to be thy last.”

From Oxford, early in January, 1878, he went on a visit to Windsor Castle, whence he wrote:  “I came to see Prince Leopold, who has been a prisoner to his sofa lately, but I trust he is better; he is very bright and gentle under severe and almost continual pain.”  No less gentle, in spite of the severe justice he was inflicting upon himself even more than upon his friend, was the author of “Fors,” as the letters of the time to his invalid neighbour in “Hortus Inclusus” show.  How ready to own himself in the wrong,—­at that very moment when he was being pointed at as the most obstinate and egotistic of men—­how placable he really was and open to rebuke, he showed, when, from Windsor, he went to Hawarden.  Nearly three years before he had written roughly of Mr. Gladstone; as a Conservative, he was not predisposed in favour of the leader of the party to whom he attributed most of the evils he was combating.  Mr. Gladstone and he had often met, and by no means agreed together in conversation.  But this visit convinced him that he had misjudged Mr. Gladstone; and he promptly made the fullest apology in the current number of “Fors,” saying that he had written under a complete misconception of his character.  In reprinting the old pages he not only cancelled the offending passage, but he left the place blank, with a note in the middle of it, as “a memorial of rash judgment.”

He went slowly northward, seeking rest at Ingleton; whence he wrote, January 17:—­“I’ve got nothing done all the time I’ve been away but a few mathematical figures [crystallography, no doubt, for ‘Deucalion,’] and the less I do the less I find I can do it; and yesterday, for the first time these twenty years, I hadn’t so much as a ‘plan’ in my head all day.”  Arrived at Brantwood, as rest was useless, he tried work.  Mr. Willett had asked him to reprint “The Two Paths,” and he got that ready for press, and wrote a short preface.  At Venice, Mr. J.R.  Anderson had been working out for him the myths illustrated by Carpaccio in the Chapel of S. Giorgio de’ Schiavoni; and the book had been waiting for Ruskin’s introduction until he was surprised by the publication of an almost identical inquiry by M. Clermont-Ganneau.  He tried to fulfil his duty to his pupil by writing the preface immediately; most sorrowfully feeling the inadequacy of his strength for the tasks he had laid upon it.  He wrote: