INTRODUCTION xlv

Ruskin’s volumes to appear with illustrations, and these were not in all respects satisfactory. He had in the preface to the first edition apologised for “the hasty and imperfect execution of the Plates.” An author who thus gives his critics a lead in disparagement never lacks those to follow it, and the Morning Herald (May 28, 1849), to quote one example only, declared the illustrations to be “so very rudely executed as to be actually repulsive, and some of them hardly intelligible.” This was the more common criticism, though some of the reviewers perceived the vigour of the workmanship. “Though only rough sketches,” said the Guardian (June 6), “not always so complete as to be entirely clear, they are executed with masterly boldness, and we doubt not, where that is aimed at, masterly accuracy. No one can look at them, at any rate, the second time, without seeing in them what power and life the sketch of a detail may manifest, and learning, in the purity of their roughest, and the decision and sureness of their wildest, lines, the difference between the rudeness of power and perfect knowledge, and the rudeness of confusion and incapacity.”

That Ruskin could draw architecture with singular delicacy, has been shown already by reproductions in earlier volumes, and will be shown further in following volumes. But the plates in the first edition of The Seven Lamps were engraved by himself, in soft-ground etching, a process of which he picked up the technique as he went along;¹ he executed some of the plates, moreover, in a hurry, and under disadvantageous conditions, biting them in the wash-hand basins of hotel bedrooms. Finding the roughness of his work more blamed, than its vigour and faithfulness appreciated, Ruskin repented of his own slighting reference to them. A letter to his publisher in that sense is here given in Appendix I. (p. 276); and in the first volume of The Stones of Venice (Appendix 8), he said in public a good word for his plates. Though “black, overbitten and hastily drawn,” “their truth,” he protested, “is carried to an extent never before attempted in architectural drawing.” They represented “the architecture itself with its actual shadows at the time of day at which it was drawn, and with every fissure and line of it as they now exist.” But the plates would hardly have served for a second edition (see below, p. xlix.), and this fact may account in part for the original delay in re-issuing the book. When a second edition was contemplated, Ruskin had the illustrations re-engraved, and in one case prepared a new drawing.

From 1855 to 1880 no further edition of The Seven Lamps appeared; and for the greater part of those twenty-five years the book was out of print. The author’s disappointment in it, which in part explains this state of things, is sufficiently expressed in the notes of 1880, included in

¹ See pp. 16, 279.

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