of seventy-five, who knows Chamonix better than Camberwell; evidently a good old lady, with the ’Christian Treasury’tossing about on the table.  She puts ‘John’ down, and holds her own opinions, and flatly contradicts him; and he receives all her opinions with a soft reverence and gentleness that is pleasant to witness....

“I wish I could reproduce a good impression of ‘John’ for you, to give you the notion of his ‘perfect gentleness and lowlihood.’  He certainly bursts out with a remark, and in a contradictious way, but only because he believes it, with no air of dogmatism or conceit.  He is different at home from that which he is in a lecture before a mixed audience, and there is a spiritual sweetness in the half-timid expression of his eyes; and in bowing to you, as in taking wine, with (if I heard aright) ‘I drink to thee,’ he had a look that has followed me, a look bordering on tearful.

“He spent some time in this way.  Unhanging a Turner from the wall of a distant room, he brought it to the table and put it in my hands; then we talked; then he went up into his study to fetch down some illustrative print or drawing; in one case, a literal view which he had travelled fifty miles to make, in order to compare with the picture.  And so he kept on gliding all over the house, hanging and unhanging, and stopping a few minutes to talk.”

And yet there were many with whom he had to deal who did not look at things in his light; who took his criticism as personal attack, and resented it with bitterness.  There is a story told (but not by himself) about one of the “Notes on the Academy,” which he was then publishing—­how he wrote to an artist therein mentioned that he regretted he could not speak more favourably of his picture, but he hoped it would make no difference in their friendship.  The artist replied (so they say) in these terms:  “Dear Ruskin,—­Next time I meet you, I shall knock you down; but I hope it will make no difference in our friendship.”  “Damn the fellow! why doesn’t he stand up for his friends?” said another disappointed acquaintance.  Perhaps Ruskin, secure in his “house with a lodge, and a valet and footman and coachman,” hardly realized that a cold word from his pen sometimes meant the failure of an important Academy picture, and serious loss of income—­that there was bitter truth underlying Punch’s complaint of the Academician: 

    “I paints and paints. 
    Hears no complaints,
     And sells before I’m dry;
    Till savage Ruskin
    Sticks his tusk in,
     And nobody will buy.”

Against these incidents should be set such an anecdote as the following, told by Mr. J.J.  Ruskin in a letter of June 3, 1858: 

“Vokins wished me to name to you that Carrick, when he read your criticism on ‘Weary Life,’ came to him with the cheque Vokins had given, and said your remarks were all right, and that he could not take the price paid by Vokins the buyer; he would alter the picture.  Vokins took back the money, only agreeing to see the picture when it was done.”

John Ruskin in reply said he did not see why Carrick should have returned the cheque.