xlviii INTRODUCTION

The text of this volume presents fewer complexities than attend the earlier books. The Stones of Venice, in its full form, was not subjected by the author to the frequent and extensive revision which the first two volumes of Modern Painters underwent. The only considerable alteration made by him in the present volume was the abridgment of some of the Appendices. In this complete edition, passages thus omitted in the second and later editions, are restored-the fact being in each case stated in a footnote. The few and minor alterations made in the body of the book are enumerated in the Bibliographical Note (p. lix.). In 1879 Ruskin issued the first volume of an abridgment of The Stones of Venice as a “Travellers’ Edition.” This edition included, of the contents of the present volume, the first chapter only (“The Quarry”), and to it he appended a few notes. These are here given in their places, being distinguished from the author’s original notes by the addition of the date, thus: [1879]. The date is that of the first publication of the edition in question; but the notes were for the most part written in 1876-1877.

The manuscript of this volume to which the editors have had access is in the possession of Mr. George Allen. It is written on some four or five hundred leaves of blue foolscap. Some remarks on the evidence of careful revision supplied by this MS. have already been made (above, p. xxxvii.), and a few illustrative examples are given in footnotes to the text (see, e.g., pp. 212, 228, 272, 353). The Allen MSS. include also several unpublished passages or discarded drafts. These are for the most part either incomplete or of little interest; a passage which seemed worth publication is given as a footnote to chapter ii. (pp. 62-63). A facsimile of the first page of the MS. of this volume is given between pp. 16 and 17.

The illustrations in this volume comprise (1) all that appeared in the original edition, (2) together with several now published for the first time. It has been thought better in a work so familiar as The Stones of Venice not to re-number the plates; the new ones are therefore distinguished by letters (A-E). The original illustrations from Ruskin’s drawings were of three kinds: (a) coloured lithographs, (b) engravings (mezzotint or line), and (c) woodcuts. With the coloured plates in the second and third editions Ruskin was far from satisfied: “I should tell you,” he wrote to a friend, “that the coloured plates in the Stones of Venice do great injustice to my drawings; the patches are

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