“He had made some discoveries:  two lads and two lasses, who[48] ... could draw in a way to please even him.  He used to say that, except in a pretty graceful way, no woman can draw; he had now almost come to think that no one else can. (This statement the undergraduates received with gallant, if undiscriminating, applause.) To many of his prejudices, Mr. Ruskin said, in the last few years the axe had been laid.  He had positively found an American, a young lady, whose life and drawing were in every way admirable. (Again great and generous applause on the part of the undergraduates, stimulated, no doubt, by the knowledge that there were then in the room two fair Americans, who have lately graced Oxford by their presence.) At the end of his lecture Mr. Ruskin committed himself to a somewhat perilous statement.  He had found two young Italian artists in whom the true spirit of old Italian art had yet lived.  No hand like theirs had been put to paper since Lippi and Leonardo.”

[Footnote 48:  Referring to Misses Alexander and Greenaway, and Messrs. Boni and Alessandri.]

Three more lectures of the course were given in May, and each repeated to a second audience.  Coming to London, he gave a private lecture on June 5th to some two hundred hearers at the house of Mrs. W.H.  Bishop, in Kensington, on Miss Kate Greenaway and Miss Alexander.  The Spectator shared his enthusiasm for the pen and ink drawings of Miss Alexander’s “Roadside Songs of Tuscany,” and concluded a glowing account of the lecture by saying:  “All Professor Ruskin’s friends must be glad to see how well his Oxford work has agreed with him.  He has gifts of insight and power of reaching the best feelings and highest hopes of our too indifferent generation which are very rare.”

With much encouragement in his work, he returned to Brantwood for the summer, and resolved upon another visit to Savoy for more geology, and another breath of health-giving Alpine air.  But he found time only for a short tour in Scotland before returning to Oxford to complete the series of lectures on recent English Art.  During this term he was prevailed upon to allow himself to be nominated as a candidate for the Rectorship of the University of Glasgow.  He had been asked to stand in the Conservative interest in 1880, and he had been worried into a rather rough reply to the Liberal party, when after some correspondence they asked him whether he sympathised with Lord Beaconsfield or Mr. Gladstone.  “What, in the devil’s name,” he exclaimed, “have you to do with either Mr. D’Israeli or Mr. Gladstone?  You are students at the University, and have no more business with politics than you have with rat-catching.  Had you ever read ten words of mine with understanding, you would have known that I care no more either for Mr. D’Israeli or Mr. Gladstone than for two old bagpipes with the drones going by steam, but that I hate all Liberalism as I do Beelzebub, and that,