INTRODUCTION xix

comparison and contrast which Ruskin drew at the time between Millais and Turner: see Pre-Raphaelitism, §§ 21-24. Ruskin perhaps wished to settle the points at variance by convincing Millais that he was a Turnerian without knowing it.¹ Millais did not go to Switzerland in 1851; the Ruskins were accompanied, as we have seen, by other friends.² During 1852 Ruskin was hard at work, and so was Millais also, but by the middle of 1853 both were in need of a holiday, and Ruskin renewed his proposal for a joint expedition. He had, as many a passage in this volume will show, a profound admiration for Millais’s genius, and a firm belief in the great works it might accomplish. He was essentially a missionary and a preacher. As was the case with Rossetti a year or two later, so with Millais; he wanted to keep his eye, as it were, on the young artist, to mould the ripening genius into accord with his own ideals, to instruct him in the way he should go.

The holiday party consisted of five persons: Ruskin and his wife, Miss M’Kenzie, who was a friend of the latter, Millais and his brother. They went first to Wallington, on a visit to Ruskin’s friends, Sir Walter and Lady Trevelyan. This was his first visit to a house where he was often afterwards to stay. Ruskin in after years had “no memory, and no notion when he first saw Pauline, Lady Trevelyan;”³ already in 1851 they were fast friends. “I enclose a letter for Lady Trevelyan,” he writes to his father from Venice (Sept. 22, 1851), “which after reading please seal and send. Her letter is enclosed also, which I am sure you will like-you will see she is clever; if you knew how good and useful she was also, you would be flattered by her signature to me-‘your own dutiful and affectionate scholar.’” His first impressions of Lady Trevelyan’s home were recorded in the usual letters to his father:-

“WALLINGTON, 23 June, 1853.-This is the most beautiful place possible-a large old seventeenth-century stone house in an old English terraced garden, beautifully kept, all the hawthorns still in full blossom; terrace opening on a sloping, wild park, down to the brook, about the half a mile fair slope; and woods on the other side, and undulating country with a peculiar Northumberlandishness about it-a faraway look which Millais enjoys intensely. We are all very happy, and going this afternoon over the moors to a little tarn where the sea-gulls come to breed.”

¹ But see further on this subject, p. li., below.

² See Vol. X. p. xxiii.

³ Præterita, ii. ch. xii. § 226.

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