INTRODUCTION lxiii

the odd set of hunting and sporting men that gentlemen-commoners usually are. One of them, for instance, rode to London and back the other day in five and a half hours, 108 miles. However, he got rusticated for his pains, so he had better have stayed at home. But Ruskin does not give in to such fancies as these, and tells them that they like their own way of living and he likes his; and so they go on, and I am glad to say they do not bully him, as I should have been afraid they would.”¹ He did not, however, escape some “ragging.” Osborne Gordon told Mr. Holman Hunt that “Ruskin had been made the subject of a great deal of horse-play on account of his avoidance of sports.”² It has been reported that Acland’s attention was first directed to Ruskin by seeing him being ridden round Tom Quad by some of the rowdier gentlemen-commoners, and that he interfered to protect the victim.³ “Another version represents that Acland’s indignation was aroused by an attempt to make the boyish-looking freshman tipsy at a wine-party.”⁴ A third story describes how some noisy spirits invaded Ruskin’s rooms one night, breaking down his oak and rushing into his bedroom. Ruskin received them in his dressing-gown. “Gentlemen,” he said, with a sweet smile, “I am sorry I cannot now entertain you as I should wish; but my father, who is engaged in the sherry trade, has put it into my power to invite you all to wine to-morrow evening. Will you come?” The rioters withdrew with “Three cheers for Ruskin!”⁵ Thus early did he illustrate a power which he had throughout life of disarming any opponents with whom he came in personal contact. Ruskin’s mother, as he tells us (p. 199), kept watch and ward from her lodgings in the High Street, and her letters to her husband give us a few more glimpses of Ruskin at Oxford. She was insistent upon his keeping early hours; but she reckoned without the young men. “It does little good sporting his oak,” she reports in an account of how Lord Desart and Bob Grimston climbed in through his window; “they say midshipmen and Oxonians have more lives than a cat, and they have need of them if they run such risks.” After the incident of the essay, described so humorously in Præterita (p. 196), there was a big wine to celebrate the event. The guests “asked him

of a dandy in a green coat of wonderful cut, supposed to represent him in his youth, but suggesting Lord Lytton’s ‘Pelham’ rather than the homespun-suited seer of Coniston. ‘Did you ever wear a coat like that?’ I asked. ‘I’m not so sure that I didn’t,’ said he” (Life and Work of John Ruskin, 1900, p. 68).

¹ Henry George Liddell, by the Rev. H. L. Thompson, 1899, p. 215 n.

² Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, vol. i. p. 323.

³ W. G. Collingwood, The Life and Work of John Ruskin, 1893, vol. i. p. 81.

⁴ J. B. Atlay’s Memoir of Sir Henry Acland, p. 41.

⁵ Obituary notice in the Times, January 22, 1900.

[Version 0.04: March 2008]