There were many periods of health, or comparative health, even in those years.  While convalescent from the illness of 1885 he continued “Praeterita” and “Dilecta,” the series of notes and letters illustrating his life.  In connection with early reminiscences, he amused himself by reproducing his favourite old nursery book, “Dame Wiggins of Lee.”  He edited the works of one or two friends, wrote occasionally to newspapers—­notably on books and reading, to the Pall Mall Gazette, in the “Symposium” on the best hundred books.  He continued his arrangements for the Museum, and held an exhibition (June, 1886) of the drawings made under his direction for the Guild.

He was already drifting into another illness when he sent the famous reply to an appeal for help to pay off the debt on a chapel at Richmond.  The letter is often misquoted for the sake of raising a laugh, so that it is not out of place to reprint it as a specimen of the more vehement expressions of this period.  The reader of his life must surely see, through the violence of the wording, a perfectly consistent and reasonable expression of Mr. Ruskin’s views:—­

“BRANTWOOD, CONISTON, LANCASHIRE.

“May 19th, 1886.

“SIR,

“I am scornfully amused at your appeal to me, of all people in the world the precisely least likely to give you a farthing!  My first word to all men and boys who care to hear me is ’Don’t get into debt.  Starve and go to heaven—­but don’t borrow.  Try first begging,—­I don’t mind, if it’s really needful, stealing!  But don’t buy things you can’t pay for!’

“And of all manner of debtors, pious people building churches they can’t pay for are the most detestable nonsense to me.  Can’t you preach and pray behind the hedges—­or in a sandpit—­or a coal-hole—­first?

“And of all manner of churches thus idiotically built iron churches are the damnablest to me.

“And of all the sects of believers in any ruling spirit—­Hindoos, Turks, Feather Idolaters, and Mumbo Jumbo, Log and Fire worshippers, who want churches, your modern English Evangelical sect is the most absurd, and entirely objectionable and unendurable to me!  All which they might very easily have found out from my books—­any other sort of sect would!—­before bothering me to write it to them.

“Ever, nevertheless, and in all this saying, your faithful servant,

“JOHN RUSKIN.”

The recipient of the letter promptly sold it.  Only three days later, Ruskin was writing one of the most striking passages in “Praeterita” (vol. ii., chap. 5)—­indeed, one of the daintiest landscape pieces in all his works, describing the blue Rhone as it flows under the bridges of Geneva.