These new papers, painfully thought out and carefully set down in his room at the Hotel de l’Union, he used—­as long before he read his daily chapter to the breakfast party at Herne Hill—­to read to Stillman:  and he sent them to the Cornhill Magazine, started the year before by Smith and Elder.  Ruskin had already contributed to it a paper on “Sir Joshua and Holbein,” a stray chapter from Vol.  V., “Modern Painters.”  His reputation as a writer and philanthropist, together with the friendliness of editor and publisher, secured the insertion of the first three,—­from August to October.  The editor then wrote to say that they were so unanimously condemned and disliked, that, with all apologies, he could only admit one more.  The series was brought hastily to a conclusion in November:  and the author, beaten back as he had never been beaten before, dropped the subject, and “sulked,” so he called it, all the winter.

It is pleasant to notice that neither Thackeray, the editor nor Smith, the publisher quarrelled with the author who had laid them open to the censure of their public,—­nor he with them.  On December 21st, he wrote to Thackeray, in answer apparently, to a letter about lecturing for a charitable purpose:  and continued: 

“The mode in which you direct your charity puts me in mind of a matter that has lain long on my mind, though I never have had the time or face to talk to you of it.  In somebody’s drawing-room, ages ago, you were speaking accidentally of M. de Marvy.[8] I expressed my great obligation to him; on which you said that I could prove my gratitude, if I chose, to his widow,—­which choice I then not accepting, have ever since remembered the circumstance as one peculiarly likely to add, so far as it went, to the general impression on your mind of the hollowness of people’s sayings and hardness of their hearts.  The fact is, I give what I give almost in an opposite way to yours.  I think there are many people who will relieve hopeless distress for one who will help at a hopeful pinch; and when I have the choice I nearly always give where I think the money will be fruitful rather than merely helpful.  I would lecture for a school when I would not for a distressed author; and would have helped De Marvy to perfect his invention, but not—­unless I had no other object—­his widow after he was gone.  In a word, I like to prop the falling more than to feed the fallen.”

[Footnote 8:  Louis Marvy, an engraver, and political refugee after the French Revolution of 1848.  He produced the plates, and Thackeray the text, of “Landscape Painters of England, in a series of steel engravings, with short Notices.”]

The winter passed without any great undertaking.  G.F.  Watts proposed to add Ruskin’s portrait to his gallery of celebrities; but he was in no mood to sit.  Rossetti did, however, sketch him this year.  In March he presented eighty-three Turner drawings to Oxford, and twenty-five to Cambridge.  The address of thanks with the great seal of Oxford University is dated March 23rd, 1861; the Catalogue of the Cambridge collection is dated May 28th.