xxx INTRODUCTION

The lectures were fixed for the beginning of November, and on October 26 the Ruskins left Glenfinlas. They paid a visit on the way to Sir John Maxwell, uncle of the historian of the artists of Spain, at Keir, reaching Edinburgh-“arrived safe,” Ruskin writes, “diagrams and all”-on October 29:-

“I really have hardly ever seen anything so lovely,” he writes to his father (Oct. 29), “as the view from Keir in the morning: a great park sloping towards the valley of the Teith, the Ochils against the sunrise, exquisite in form, and covered with pines like the Jura-Stirling rising like an island out of the mist, and the broken crags about the Bridge of Allan and the farther hills beyond Stirling appearing and disappearing as the mist melted or formed.”

The first of the four lectures-that on Domestic Architecture-was delivered on the evening of November 1. Friends and admirers had travelled to Edinburgh to hear and see the author of Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice. His father and mother, however-either as still disapproving, or from nervousness-had remained at home, and Ruskin’s letters to them give full accounts of it all:-

“Wednesday morning [2 Nov., 1853].-Everything went off capitally, and I was heard very well without any exertion. I found myself quite at my ease, and that people thought so, and they are all very much pleased.”

“Wednesday evening.-Dr. Guthrie, Sir W. and Lady Trevelyan, and Mr. Jameson, formed our dinner party to-day. Dr. Guthrie just as delightful out of pulpit as in it-a Scottish Mr. Melvill;¹ much interesting conversation about ragged schools.² He paid me many

Venice,’ ” etc. [Then the synopsis of Lectures i. and ii.] “II. Two Lectures on Painting: with Reference to the Prospects and Objects of Modern Schools (Illustrated by Drawings). By John Ruskin, Esq.” [Then the synopsis of Lectures iii. and iv.]

¹ See Vol. I. p. 490.

² Dr. Guthrie was minister of the St. John’s Free Church. A few days after meeting Ruskin, he received the following letter, accompanying a copy of The Stones of Venice:-

“I found a little difficulty in writing the words on the front page, wondering whether you would think the ‘affectionate’ misused or insincere. But I made up my mind at last to write what I felt-believing that you must be accustomed to people’s getting very seriously and truly attached to you, almost at first sight, and therefore would believe me.

“You asked me, the other evening, some kind questions about my father. He was an Edinburgh boy; and in answer to some account by me of the pleasure I had had in hearing you, and in the privilege of knowing you, as also of your exertions in the cause of the Edinburgh poor, he desires me to send you the enclosed-to be applied by you in such

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