xxviii INTRODUCTION

drawings with which he meant to illustrate them. He went over some of the ground with Millais, who took up the subject of architecture with avidity. He had already mastered The Stones of Venice. “If you have leisure to read,” he wrote to Mr. Combe, “get Ruskin’s two last volumes, which surpass all he has written.”¹ In a later letter he says:-

“Ruskin and myself are pitching into architecture; you will hear shortly to what purpose. I think now I was intended for a Master Mason. All this day I have been working at a window, which I hope you will see carried out very shortly in stone. In my evening hours I mean to make many designs for church and other architecture, as I find myself quite familiar with constructions, Ruskin having given me lessons regarding foundations and the building of cathedrals, etc., etc. This is no loss of time-rather a real relaxation from everyday painting-and it is immensely necessary that something new and good should be done in the place of the old ornamentations. ... Do, if you can, come and hear Ruskin’s lectures.”²

Ruskin, it will thus be seen, had made a convert by his lectures before they were delivered; and one catches in Millais’s words a reflection of that spirit of eager zeal and fervid enthusiasm of which Ruskin when he lectured seemed, in later years at any rate, a living embodiment. Millais’s help, however, was not limited to the rôle of sympathetic listener at rehearsals. “We are busy making drawings for the lectures,” he writes in a later letter; the artist’s drawing of a tiger (Plate IX.), which was shown at the first lecture, was given as the frontispiece to the original edition of the lectures.

The following letter addressed to the Secretary of the Philosophical Institution gives Ruskin’s synopsis:-

“Monday, GLENFINLAS, 8th August.

“MY DEAR SIR,-I can hardly tell what I shall say in November at present, as I am down here tired, and cannot at present set myself to arranging a plan of lectures properly; but I believe the following sketch will not be much departed from:-

“1st Lecture. General Construction of Domestic Buildings.

“General aspect of Edinburgh. Dependent on its position more than its architecture, and on its houses more than its public buildings. Interest of its citizens in domestic architecture. Fault of modern

¹ Life of Millais, vol. i. p. 203.

² Ibid., p. 204; on which page there is also a reproduction of a design made by Millais for a Gothic window. It is added that Millais made a large number of other designs at this time for architectural decoration. That for the window

[Version 0.04: March 2008]