INTRODUCTION xliii

spring. There are but few letters, memorials, or diary-entries of this period (1852-1853); it must have been a time of hard and continuous work, with the two volumes of The Stones to be revised, re-cast, and completed, and the plates to be prepared.

How busy he was may be gathered from apologetic letters to his friends. “Pray ask Mrs. Harrison to forgive my rudeness,” he writes to his old friend and mentor, W. H. Harrison, “in not having called, but I am tormented by the very gentry of whom Cruikshank was talking, the woodcutters, until I begin to believe they consider me the block they are to carve upon; and all I can do is to get my run in the forenoon each day-as much open air as possible. I have not been into one house, up the hill or down, save my own and my father’s, for a month back.” So, again, he writes to F. T. Palgrave (March 14, 1853):-

“I am getting the work of eighteen months to a conclusion, and am obliged to keep for a fortnight or three weeks my forenoon and evenings unbroken, but if you like walking we could have a walk together any day after Wednesday that is fine, from four to six, my days at present being thus divided. I don’t get up very early: don’t breakfast till eight, nor get to my work before half-past nine. I have then about four hours for writing, including letters: we dine at half-past one, and from half-past two till four I draw; then I walk till six, come home to tea, and read in the evenings. Now you can either lunch with us at our dinner, and come out and take a walk to Norwood with me at four o’clock any day you like: the March afternoons are now very delightful.”

By the end of the year (1852) the second volume was nearly off his hands; it was out early in the spring, and for the London season of 1853 he took a house (No. 6) in Charles Street, Grosvenor Square. The third volume of The Stones was now nearing completion, and he had written also the first part of his notes for the Arundel Society on Giotto and his Works in Padua. In July 1853 he took a cottage at Glenfinlas for a well-earned holiday, on which he and his wife were presently joined by the brothers William and John Everett Millais. In Scotland he passed the last proofs of the third volume of The Stones, but his principal work there was the preparation of his Edinburgh Lectures on Architecture and Painting; the story of his Scottish sojourn may therefore conveniently be deferred to the Introduction to that book (Vol. XII.). By the time the lectures were ready the last volume of The Stones of Venice had been given to the public.

It had been Ruskin’s intention to conclude the work in one volume, the second; but even with much curtailment his materials were found

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