There were four terms in the Working Men’s College year, the only vacation, except for the fortnight at Christmas, being from the beginning of August to the end of October.  Ruskin did not always attend throughout the summer term, though sometimes his class came down to him into the country to sketch.  He kept up the work without other intermission until May, 1858, after which the completion of “Modern Painters” and many lecture-engagements took him away for a time.  In the spring of 1860 he was back at his old post for a term; but after that he discontinued regular attendance, and went to the Working Men’s College only at intervals, to give addresses or informal lectures to students and friends.  On such occasions the “drawing-room” or first floor of the house in which the College was held would be always crowded, with an audience who heard the lecturer at his best; speaking freely among friends out of a full treasure-house “things new and old”—­accounts of recent travel, lately-discovered glories of art, and the growing burden of the prophecy that in those years was beginning to take more definite shape in his mind.

As a teacher, Ruskin spared no pains to make the work interesting.  He provided—­Mr. E. Cooke informs me that he was the first to provide—­casts from natural leaves and fruit in place of the ordinary conventional ornament; and he sent a tree to be fixed in a corner of the class-room for light and shade studies.  Mr. W. Ward in the preface to the volume of letters already quoted says that he used to bring his minerals and shells, and rare engravings and drawings, to show them.

“His delightful way of talking about these things afforded us most valuable lessons.  To give an example:  he one evening took for his subject a cap, and with pen and ink showed us how Rembrandt would have etched, and Albert Duerer engraved it.  This at once explained to us the different ideas and methods of the two masters.  On another evening he would take a subject from Turner’s ‘Liber Studiorum,’ and with a large sheet of paper and some charcoal, gradually block in the subject, explaining at the same time the value and effect of the lines and masses.”

And for sketching from nature he would take his class out into the country, and wind up with tea and talk.  “It was a treat to hear and see him with his men,” writes Dr. Furnivall.

His object in the work, as he said before the Royal Commission on National Institutions, was not to make artists, but to make the workmen better men, to develop their powers and feelings,—­to educate them, in short.  He always has urged young people intending to study art as a profession to enter the Academy Schools, as Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites did, or to take up whatever other serious course of practical discipline was open to them.  But he held very strongly that everybody could learn drawing, that their eyes could be brightened and their hands steadied, and that they could be taught to appreciate the great works of nature and of art, without wanting to make pictures or to exhibit and sell them.