or two, and glancing round at the sheets on the wall as he takes off his gloves, he rises, and leaning slightly over the desk, with his hands folded across, begins at once,—­’You are proud of your good city of Edinburgh,’ etc.

[Footnote 5:  “Mary Russell Mitford found him as a young man ’very eloquent and distinguished-looking, tall, fair, and slender, with a gentle playfulness, and a sort of pretty waywardness that was quite charming.’  Sydney Dobell, again, in 1852, discovered an earnestness pervading every feature, giving power to a face that otherwise would be merely lovable for its gentleness.  And, finally, one who visited him at Denmark Hill characterized him as emotional and nervous, with a soft, genial eye, a mouth ‘thin and severe,’ and a voice that, though rich and sweet, yet had a tendency to sink into a plaintive and hopeless tone,”—­Literary World, May 19, 1893.]

“And now for the style of the lecture....  Properly speaking, there were two styles essentially distinct, and not well blended,—­a speaking and a writing style; the former colloquial and spoken off-hand; the latter rhetorical and carefully read in quite a different voice,—­we had almost said intoned....  He has a difficulty in sounding the letter ‘r’; [and there is a] peculiar tone in the rising and falling of his voice at measured intervals, in a way scarcely ever heard except in the public lection of the service appointed to be read in churches.  These are the two things with which, perhaps you are most surprised,—­his dress and manner of speaking—­both of which (the white waistcoat notwithstanding) are eminently clerical.  You naturally expect, in one so independent, a manner free from conventional restraint, and an utterance, whatever may be the power of voice, at least expressive of a strong individuality; and you find instead a Christ Church man of ten years’ standing, who has not yet taken orders; his dress and manner derived from his college tutor, and his elocution from the chapel-reader.”

The lectures were a summing up, in popular form, of the chief topics of Ruskin’s thought during the last two years.  The first (November 1) stated, with more decision and warmth than part of his audience approved, his plea for the Gothic Revival, for the use of Gothic as a domestic style.  The next lecture, given three days later, went on to contrast the wealth of ornament in mediaeval buildings with the poor survivals of conventionalized patterns which did duty for decoration in nineteenth-century “Greek” architecture; and he raised a laugh by comparing a typical stonemason’s lion with a real tiger’s head, drawn in the Edinburgh zoological gardens by Mr. Millais.

The last two lectures, on November 15 and 18, were on Painting; briefly reviewing the history of landscape and the life and aims of Turner; and finally, Christian art and Sincerity in imagination, which was now put forth as the guiding principle of Pre-Raphaelitism.