“We are still labouring under the foul kind of influenza here, I not far from emancipated, my poor wife still deep in the business, though I hope past the deepest.  Am I to understand that you too are seized?  In a day or two I hope to ascertain that you are well again.  Adieu; here is an interruption, here also is the end of the paper.

     “With many thanks and regards.”

     [Signature cut away.]

As soon as the first volume of “Stones of Venice” and the “Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds” were published, Ruskin took a short Easter holiday at Matlock, and set to work at a new edition of “Modern Painters.”  This was the fifth reprint of the first volume, and the third of vol. ii.  They were carefully and conscientiously revised, and the Postscript indulged in a little triumph at the changed tone of public criticism upon Turner.

But it was too late to have been much service to the great artist himself.  In 1845—­after saying good-bye and “Why will you go to Switzerland? there will be such a fidge about you when you’re gone”—­Turner lost his health, and was never himself again.  The last drawings he did for Ruskin (January, 1848), the “Bruenig” and the “Descent from the St. Gothard to Airolo,” showed his condition unmistakably; and the lonely restlessness of the last, disappointing years were, for all his friends, a melancholy ending to a brilliant career.  Ruskin wrote: 

     “This year (1851) he has no picture on the walls of the Academy;
     and the Times of May 3 says:  ’We miss those works of
     INSPIRATION’!”

“We miss!  Who misses?  The populace of England rolls by to weary itself in the great bazaar of Kensington,[3] little thinking that a day will come when those veiled vestals and prancing amazons, and goodly merchandise of precious stones and gold, will all be forgotten as though they had not been; but that the light which has faded from the walls of the Academy is one which a million Koh-i-noors could not rekindle; and that the year 1851 will, in the far future, be remembered less for what it has displayed, than for what it has withdrawn.”

[Footnote 3:  The Great Exhibition in Hyde Park.]

CHAPTER V

PRE-RAPHAELITISM (1851-1853)

The Times, in May 1851, missed “those works of inspiration,” as Ruskin had at last taught people to call Turner’s pictures.  But the acknowledged mouthpiece of public opinion found consolation in castigating a school of young artists who had “unfortunately become notorious by addicting themselves to an antiquated style and an affected simplicity in painting....  We can extend no toleration to a mere servile imitation of the cramped style, false perspective, and crude colour of remote antiquity.  We want not to see what Fuseli termed drapery ’snapped instead of folded’; faces bloated into apoplexy, or extenuated into skeletons; colour borrowed from the jars in a druggist’s shop, and expression forced into caricature....  That morbid infatuation which sacrifices truth, beauty, and genuine feeling to mere eccentricity deserves no quarter at the hands of the public.”