On April 2nd he addressed the St. George’s Mission Working Men’s Institute, and shortly afterwards, though at this time in a much enfeebled state of health, gave a lecture before “a most brilliant audience,” as the London Review reported, at the Royal Institution (April 19th, 1861).  Carlyle wrote to his brother John: 

“Friday last I was persuaded—­in fact had inwardly compelled myself as it were—­to a lecture of Ruskin’s at the Institution, Albemarle Street, Lecture on Tree Leaves as physiological, pictorial, moral, symbolical objects.  A crammed house, but tolerable even to me in the gallery.  The lecture was thought to ‘break down,’ and indeed it quite did ‘as a lecture’; but only did from embarras de richesses—­a rare case.  Ruskin did blow asunder as by gunpowder explosions his leaf notions, which were manifold, curious, genial; and in fact, I do not recollect to have heard in that place any neatest thing I liked so well as this chaotic one.”

Papers on “Illuminated Manuscripts” (read before the Society of Antiquaries on June 6th) and on “The Preservation of Ancient Buildings” (read to the Ecclesiological Society a fortnight later) show that old interests were not wholly forgotten, even in the stress of new pursuits, by this man of many-sided activity.

During May, 1861, he paid a visit to the school girls at Winnington, in June and July he took a holiday at Boulogne with the fisher folk, in August he went to Ireland as guest of the Latouches of Harristown, County Kildare, and in September he returned to the Alps, spending the rest of the year at Bonneville and Lucerne.

CHAPTER II

“MUNERA PULVERIS” (1862)

After an autumn among the Alps, hearing that the Turner drawings in the National Gallery had been mildewed, he ran home to see about them in January 1862; and was kept until the end of May.  He found that his political economy work was not such a total failure as it had seemed.  Froude, then editor of Fraser’s Magazine, thought there was something in it, and would give him another chance.  So, by way of a fresh start, he had his four Cornhill articles published in book form; and almost simultaneously, in June 1862 the first of the new series appeared.

The author had then returned to Lucerne with Mr. and Mrs. Burne-Jones, with whom he crossed the St. Gothard to Milan, where he tried to forget the harrowing of hell in a close study of Luini, and in copying the “St. Catherine” now at Oxford.  Ruskin has never said so much about Luini as, perhaps, he intended.  A short notice in the “Cestus of Aglaia,” and occasional references scattered up and down his later works, hardly give the prominence in his writings that the painter held in his thoughts.  It was about this time that he was made an Hon. Member of the Florentine Academy.

He re-crossed the Alps, and settled to his work on political economy at Mornex, where he spent the winter except for a short run home, which gave him the opportunity of addressing the Working Men’s College on November 29.