xxxii INTRODUCTION

well bound together; the eye we could not see in consequence of the shadows that fell upon his countenance from the lights overhead, but we are sure it must be soft and luminous, and that the poetry and passion we looked for almost in vain in other features are concentrated there....

“And now for the style of the lecture, you say; what was it? Properly speaking, there were in the lectures two styles essentially distinct, and not well blended,-a speaking and a writing style; the former colloquial and spoken off-hand; the latter rhetorical and carefully read in quite a different voice,-we had almost said intoned. When speaking of the sketches on the wall, or employing local illustrations,-such as the buildings of the city,-he talked in an apt, easy, and often humorous manner; but in treating the general relations of the subject, he had recourse to the manuscript leaves on the desk, written in a totally different style, and, naturally enough, read in a very different tone of voice. The effect of this transition was often strange; the audience, too, evidently sometimes had a difficulty in following the rapid change, and did not always keep up with the movement. It would on all accounts have been better had one style been observed throughout. This was plainly seen in the lectures on Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, which were almost entirely read, and certainly had far more unity and compactness than either of the previous ones. Mr. Ruskin’s elocution is peculiar; he has a difficulty in sounding the letter ‘r’; but it is not this we now refer to, it is to the peculiar tone in the rising and falling of his voice at measured intervals, in a way scarcely ever heard except in the public lection of the service appointed to be read in churches. These are the two things with which, perhaps, you are most surprised,-his dress and his manner of speaking,-both of which (the white waistcoat notwithstanding) are eminently clerical. You naturally expect, in one so independent, a manner free from conventional restraint, and an utterance, whatever may be the power of voice, at least expressive of a strong individuality; and you find instead a Christ Church man of ten years’ standing, who has not yet taken orders; his dress and manner derived from his college tutor, and his elocution from the chapel reader. At first you altogether refuse to identify the lecturer with the author of Modern Painters and the Seven Lamps; he sometimes reminds you of that individual, but is still not the same. By degrees, however, you get over this feeling; you see more points of resemblance, and begin to understand that they are really one. This, for the most part, is the effect of the more solemn and earnest passages, whether of exhortation, warning, denunciation, or entreaty, which are, more than anything beside, characteristic of both lecturer and writer” (Edinburgh Guardian, November 19, 1853).

One gathers from this description that Ruskin did not attain at the first attempt the freedom and mastery which he afterwards displayed

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