At last his friends were gone; and, left alone, he overworked himself, as usual, before leaving Venice with crammed portfolios and closely-written notebooks.  At Padua he was stopped by a fever; all through France he was pursued by what, from his account, appears to have been some form of diphtheria, averted only, as he believed, in direct answer to earnest prayer.  At last his eventful pilgrimage was ended, and he was restored to his home and his parents.  It was not long before he was at work again in his new study, looking out upon the quiet meadow and grazing cows of Denmark Hill, and rapidly throwing into form the fresh impressions of the summer.  He was strongly influenced by the sermons of Canon Melvill—­the same preacher whom Browning in his youth admired—­a good orator and sound analytic expositor, though not a great or independent thinker.  Osborne Gordon had recommended him to read Hooker, and he caught the tone and style of the “Ecclesiastical Polity” only too readily, so that much of his work of that winter, the more philosophical part of vol. ii., was damaged by inversions, and Elizabethan quaintness as of ruff and train, long epexegetical sentences, and far-sought pomposity of diction.  It was only when he had waded through the chaos which he set himself to survey, that he could lay aside his borrowed stilts, and stand on his own feet in the Tintoret descriptions—­rather stiff, yet, from foregone efforts.

This volume, like the first, was completed in the winter, in one long spell of hard work, broken only by a visit to Oxford in January as the guest of Dr. Greswell, Head of Worcester, at a conference for the promotion of art.  Smith and Elder accepted the book on Mr. J.J.  Ruskin’s terms (so his wife wrote), for they had already reported it as called for by the public.  The first volume was going into a third edition.

When his book came out he was away again in Italy, trying to show his father all that he had seen in the Campo Santo and Giotto’s Tower, and to explain “why it more than startled him.”  The good man hardly felt the force of it all at once.  And there were little passages of arms and some heart-quaking and head-shaking, until Mr. Dale, the old schoolmaster, wrote that he had heard no less a man than Sydney Smith mention the new book in public, in the presence of “distinguished literary characters,” as a work of “transcendent talent, presenting the most original views, in the most elegant and powerful language, which would work a complete revolution in the world of taste.”  When he returned home it was to find a respectful welcome.  His word on matters of Art was now really worth something, and before long it was called for.  The National Gallery was comparatively in its infancy.  It had been established less than twenty-five years, and its manager, Mr. Eastlake (afterwards Sir Charles), had his hands full, what with rascally dealers in forged old masters, and incompetent picture-cleaners; and