INTRODUCTION xxxv

said, how he said it, and how he was received; he had not mentioned how he was dressed:-

“My dress at lectures,” wrote Ruskin to his father (Dec. 1), “was my usual dinner dress, just what you and my mother like me best in; coat by Stulz.¹ It only produced an effect here, because their lecturers seem usually to address them, and they come to hear, in frock coats and dirty boots.”

Ruskin seems to have been much lionised on the occasion of this visit to Edinburgh (during which he lodged in Albyn Place), and in a lively letter (November 27) to his father, he gives a long list of the various people, small and great, who had paid him attention and whose calls or other civilities he had been backward in returning. In most cases the names are accompanied by little character-sketches-sometimes caustic but never ill-humoured-of most of the leaders of Edinburgh society in that day, including Lord Cockburn, Hugh Miller (the geologist), Sir George and Lady Home, Mr. Dennistoun (author of The Dukes of Urbino), and Sir William Hamilton. The friends made on this occasion whom he most valued were Dr. John Brown-“called by his friends the ‘beloved physician’-and Professor John Stuart Blackie.” Here is Ruskin’s first impression of the latter:-

“Professor and Mrs. Blackie. Professor very funny, very clever; wife very nice, a great admirer of mine; Professor (of Greek) a great adversary, but all above board; has been ill. I have had to inquire for, and contend with him. I have quarrelled him well again.”

The more he saw of the Professor the more he liked him:-

“(December 4.)- ... I have made some agreeable and valuable friends, most especially Professor Blackie, a thoroughly original, daring, enthusiastic, amiable, eccentric, masterly fellow. ... He has taught me more Greek in an hour than I learnt at Oxford in six months, having studied the living language. I am in a great state of delight at knowing for the first time in my life that it is a living one. The Professor gave me to-day a Greek newspaper, about a week old, printed at Athens, and in good old Attic Greek hardly differing in a syllable from the language of Alcibiades, except in its subject-matter.”

¹ [Compare Vol. III. p. 380 n. Stulz is named as the typical tailor in Carlyle’s Past and Present, book iii. ch. xiii.

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