At Bower’s Well, Perth, where his grandparents had spent their later years, and where his parents had been married, lived Mr. George Gray, a lawyer, and an old acquaintance of the Ruskin family.  His daughter Euphemia used to visit at Denmark Hill.  It was for her that, some years earlier, “The King of the Golden River” had been written.  She had grown up into a perfect Scotch beauty, with every gift of health and spirits which would compensate—­the old folk thought—­for his retiring and morbid nature.  They were anxious, now more than ever, to see him settled.  They pressed him, in letters still extant, to propose.  We have seen how he was situated, and can understand how he persuaded himself that fortune, after all, was about to smile upon him.  Her family had their own reasons for promoting the match, and all united in hastening on the event.

In the Notes to Exhibitions added to a new edition of “Modern Painters,” then in the Press, the author mentions a “hurried visit to Scotland in the spring” of 1848.  This was the occasion of his marriage at Perth, on April 10.  The young couple spent rather more than a fortnight on the way South, among Scotch and English lakes, intending to make a more extended tour in the summer to the cathedrals and abbeys.

The pilgrimage began with Salisbury, where a few days’ sketching in the damp and draughts of the cathedral laid the bridegroom low, and brought the tour to an untimely end.  In August, the young people were seen safely off to Normandy, where they went by easy stages from town to town, studying the remains of Gothic building.  In October they returned and settled in a house of their own, at 31, Park Street, where during the winter he wrote “The Seven Lamps of Architecture,” and, as a bit of by-work, a notice of Samuel Prout for the Art Journal.

This was Ruskin’s first illustrated volume.  The plates were engraved by himself in soft-ground etching, such as Prout had used, from drawings he had made in 1846 and 1848.  Some are scrappy combinations of various detail, but others, such as the Byzantine capital, the window in Giotto’s Campanile, the arches from St. Lo in Normandy, from St. Michele at Lucca, and from the Ca’ Foscari at Venice, are effective studies of the actual look of old buildings, seen as they are shown us in Nature, with her light and the shade added to all the facts of form, and her own last touches in the way of weather-softening, and settling-faults, and tufted, nestling plants.

Revisiting the Hotel de la Cloche at Dijon in later years, Ruskin showed me the room where he had “bitten” the last plate in his wash-hand basin, as a careless makeshift for the regular etcher’s bath.  He was not dissatisfied with his work himself; the public of the day wanted something more finished.  So the second edition appeared with the subjects elaborately popularized in fashionable engraving.  More recently they have undergone reduction for a cheap issue.  But any book lover knows the value of the original “Seven Lamps” with its San Miniato cover and autograph plates.