Public opinion was violently divided over these lectures; and they were the cause of much trouble at home.  The fact of his lecturing at all aroused strong opposition from his friends and remonstrances from his parents.  Before the event his mother wrote:  “I cannot reconcile myself to the thought of your bringing yourself personally before the world till you are somewhat older and stronger.”  Afterwards, his father, while apologizing for the word “degrading,” is disgusted at his exposing himself to such an interruption as occurred, and to newspaper comments and personal references.  The notion of an “itinerant lecturer” scandalizes him.  He hears from Harrison and Holding that John is to lecture even at their very doors—­in Camberwell.  “I see small bills up,” he writes, “with the lecturers’ names; among them Mr. ——­ who gets your old clothes!” And he bids him write to the committee that his parents object to his fulfilling the engagement.  He postponed his lecture—­for ten years; but accepted the Presidency of the Camberwell Institute, which enabled him to appear at their meetings without offence to any.

While staying at Edinburgh, Mr. Ruskin met the various celebrities of modern Athens, some of them at the table of his former fellow-traveller in Venice, Mrs. Jameson.  He then returned home to prepare the lectures for printing.

These lectures as published in April, 1854 were fiercely assailed by the old school; but a more serious blow fell on him before that month was out.  His wife returned to her parents and instituted a suit against him, to which he made no answer.  The marriage was annulled in July.  A year later she married Millais.

In May (1854) the Pre-Raphaelites again needed his defence.  Mr. Holman Hunt exhibited the “Light of the World” and the “Awakening Conscience.”  Ruskin made them the theme of two more letters to The Times; mentioning, by the way, the “spurious imitations of Pre-Raphaelite work” which were already becoming common.  Starting for his summer tour on the Continent, in the Simmenthal he wrote a pamphlet on the opening of the Crystal Palace.  There had been much rejoicing over the “new style of architecture” in glass and iron, and its purpose as a palace of art.  Ruskin who had declined, in the last chapter of the “Seven Lamps,” to join in the cry for a new style, was not at all ready to accept this as any real artistic advance; and took the opportunity to plead again for the great buildings of the past, which were being destroyed or neglected, while the British public was glorifying its gigantic greenhouse.  The pamphlet practically suggested the establishment of the Society for the preservation of ancient buildings, which has since come into operation.

This summer of 1854 he projected a study of Swiss history:  to tell the tale of six chief towns—­Geneva, Fribourg, Basle, Thun, Baden and Schaffhausen, to which in 1858 he added Rheinfelden and Bellinzona.  He intended to illustrate the work with pictures of the places described.  He began with his drawing of Thun, a large bird’s-eye view of the town with its river and bridges, roofs and towers, all exquisitely defined with the pen, and broadly coloured in fluctuating tints that seem to melt always into the same aerial blue; the blue, high up the picture, beyond the plain, deepening into distant mountains.