“We venture to send you, as you begin your eighty-first year, these few words of greeting and good-will, to make you sure that in Oxford the gratitude and reverence with which men think of you is ever fresh.  You have helped many to find in life more happiness than they thought it held; and we trust there is happiness in the latter years of your long life.  You have taught many to see the wealth of beauty in nature and in art, prizing the remembrance of it; and we trust that the sights you have best loved come back to your memory with unfading beauty.  You have encouraged many to keep a good heart through dark days, and we trust that the courage of a constant hope is yours.”

The London Ruskin Society sent a separate address; and to show that if not a prophet in his own country he was at any rate a valued friend, the Coniston Parish Council resolved “and carried unanimously,” says the local journal, “with applause,”

“That the congratulations of this council be offered to Mr. John Ruskin, on the occasion of his eightieth birthday, together with the warm thanks which they and all their neighbours feel for the kindness he has shown, and the many generous acts he has done to them and theirs during twenty-seven years of residence at Coniston, where his presence is most truly appreciated, and his name will always be most gratefully remembered.”

But as the year went on he did not regain his usual summer strength.  Walking out had become a greater weariness to him, and he had to submit to the humiliation of a bath-chair.  To save himself even the labour of creeping down to his study, he sat usually in the turret-room upstairs, next to his bed-chamber, but still with the look of health in his face, and the fire in his eyes quite unconquered.  He would listen while Baxter read the news to him, following public events with interest, or while Mrs. Severn or Miss Severn read stories, novel after novel; but always liking old favourities best, and never anything that was unhappy.  Some pet books he would pore over, or drowse over by the hour.  The last of these was one in which he had a double interest, for it was about ships of war, and it was written by the kinsman of a dear friend.  Some of the artists he had loved and helped had failed him or left him, but Burne-Jones was always true.  One night, going up to bed, the old man stopped long to look at the photograph from Philip Burne-Jones’s portrait of his father.  “That’s my dear brother, Ned,” he said, nodding good-bye to the picture as he went.  Next night the great artist died, and of all the many losses of these later years this one was the hardest to bear.

So when a little boy lent him “A Fleet in Being” he read and re-read it; then got a copy for himself, and might have learnt it by heart, so long he pored over it.  But when the little boy or his sisters went to visit the “Di Pa” (Dear Papa), as he liked children to call their old friend, he had now scarcely anything to talk about.  “He just looked at us, and smiled,” they would report; “and we couldn’t think what to say.”