INTRODUCTION xxxiii

at 30 instead of 86; and his chief of the staff, who is not now in Verona, left his carriage for us, with all manner of insists on our using it when we wanted; and the Marshal’s two aide-de-camps and another young officer came to escort us in our drive in the evening. It was pleasant, after being so long in Venice, to see the young men’s riding-the nice, loose, cavalry balanced, swinging seat, and the horses as happy as their masters, but keeping their place beside the carriage to a hair’s-breadth. We went to an old Veronese castle on one of the first slopes of the Alpine spurs above the plain, and it was delightful to have one’s foot again upon the rocks, and see the shadows of the cypresses on the long summer grass.”

Ruskin and his wife themselves received occasionally in a quiet way, and gave evening parties to their Austrian and Italian acquaintance. They were sought out, too, by compatriots who chanced to be in Venice. We read, in Ruskin’s letters home, of Scott (Sir Gilbert) coming to tea, and “a great architectural séance” afterwards; of an expected visit from the Bishop of Oxford (Wilberforce); of “several lectures on the Renaissance” given to Mr. Gibbs, tutor to the Prince of Wales, in the hope of exercising “influence in that quarter”-lectures which may or may not have been passed on to his present Majesty. Of Lord Dufferin, who came to dinner and to tea, we get a little sketch:-

“The Venetians have certainly some reason to think the English odd people. Lord Dufferin was paddling about in the lagoons all the while he was here, in one of those indian-rubber boats which you may see hanging up at the door of a shop in Bond Street. He took it over to Lido and rowed some way in the sea with it; when he landed, an Austrian coast-guard came to investigate him, and wanted to rip up his boat to see what was inside! ...” (Letter to his father, November 10).

Ruskin was in request as cicerone. Thus we read that (Sept. 16), “I showed the Dean of St. Paul’s [Milman] over the Duomo of Murano yesterday, abusing St. Paul’s all the time, and making him observe the great superiority of the old church and the abomination of its Renaissance additions, and the Dean was much disgusted.” But we may doubt whether Ruskin had it all his own way, for in a later letter (Sept. 20) we learn that the Dean “is very fond of hearing himself talk and very positive,” though “very good and on the whole sensible.” English artists preparing pictures of Venice for the exhibitions-E. W. Cooke and David Roberts among the number-foregathered with their critic. Ruskin tells his father how much the paternal sherry was appreciated: “the artists declared it was like the best painting, at once tender and expressive.”

But these were only occasional distractions. Nothing was allowed

X. c

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