lxxx INTRODUCTION

belongs to the year 1868. It is in water-colour (19 x 12), and is in the possession of Mr. T. W. Jackson, Vice-Provost of Worcester College, Oxford (one of the trustees of the Ruskin Drawing School), by whose kind permission it is here reproduced. It may be noted that in the Architectural Review of December 1898 a reproduction was given of a drawing of the same subject, which was ascribed to Ruskin; this was an error, the drawing there reproduced being one by his assistant, J. J. Laing, which used to hang in the Drawing School at Oxford.

That of “St. Martin’s” (Plate XXXIII.), in pen and violet (7¼ x 11), is at Brantwood. The date is uncertain.

Lastly, the “Mont Blanc de St. Gervais” (Plate XXXIV.) is a memorial of the tour of 1882. The drawing is in water-colour (5 x 7).

Of the facsimiles, the first sheet (facing p. 72) shows (1) a page from one of Ruskin’s books of abstracts of sermons, written in his boyhood (about 1827), as described in the text. The book is in the Ruskin Museum at Coniston, and the page here given is also reproduced in W. G. Collingwood’s Ruskin Relics (p. 199), “to show the care of writing and choice of wording insisted upon.” (2) In the centre of the sheet is Ruskin’s “first map of Italy” (1827), reproduced from the coloured original. (3) The page of the MS. of The Poetry of Architecture (§§ 207, 208, Vol. I. p. 155) is of the year 1837; it is from “the draft scribbled in a sketch-book during vacation” (Ruskin Relics, p. 144).

The next sheet (facing p. 121) gives a page of a Dictionary of Minerals (1831); the page is in the Ruskin Museum. He refers to the Dictionary in Præterita (p. 121). “It shows,” says Mr. Collingwood, “his very early interest and diligence, at the time when he cared nothing for pictures or political economy, but loved nature in all her ways. This page begins his juvenile account of Galena, a word which in later days often brought out a smile and a story. For years, he said, he was wretched because his great and glorious specimen of this same Lead Glance had a flaw in it, an angular notch, breaking the dainty exactitude of the big, black, shining crystal, otherwise as regular as the most consummate art could plane and polish it. One day, with the lens, he noticed that the form of the notch corresponded with the shape of a crystal of calcite embedded in another specimen. His galena had not been damaged; it was nature’s work, and all the more wonderful now; and life was still worth living” (Ruskin Relics, p. 173).

The third sheet (facing p. 152) is photographed from a coloured

[Version 0.04: March 2008]