INTRODUCTION xxvii

to play some four bars of his favourite Vieni alla Finestra tolerably correctly, but it was not a system attended by rapid progress.... Whether the girls understood much of the lessons, I do not know; but they were not in the least afraid of him, and Jane Anne seemed to regard him with something of a maternal indulgence. ‘He’s a foony man is Meester Rooskin,’ she would observe after a lesson, ‘boot he likes oos to tek a good tea’; and this covered a multitude of eccentric enthusiasms.”1

It is a picture of active, benevolent, and happy old age which has thus far been drawn; but these same years were broken by serious attacks of illness, which came with greater frequency, and ultimately brought his active life to an end. Perhaps if he could have abstained from exciting occupations, the danger might have been averted. But, now as in former years, he knew the danger better than he succeeded in averting it. “Require greatest caution,” he noted (March 25, 1886), “from usual press of coincident thoughts”; and again (April 8), “Politics so fearful now in the papers that I’m like a dog in a chain -like the dog in the woodyard that can’t get at Mr. Quilp.”² But often, as the letters to the press in Vol. XXXIV. have shown, he slipped his chain, and was in the thick of the fight. At the end of July 1885 he had a fourth and very severe attack of delirious fever; and, almost exactly a year after, a fifth. He went for a short time after this latter attack to Heysham, on the Lancashire coast; but the spring of 1887 brought news of the death of Laurence Hilliard,³ of pleurisy, on a friend’s yacht in the Ægean. Ruskin loved him dearly, and the loss deepened a mood of depression, which passed into one of anger and suspicion. “To be worth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain.” It was a distressing feature of some of Ruskin’s illnesses that Coleridge’s lines were reversed: the madness in the brain made him wroth with those he loved. There are letters written at such times which should be destroyed, and there were incidents which need not be recalled. The friend, assistant, and biographer, who was much with him during these years, has written some touching words which I must be allowed to quote:-

“From one who has been out in the storm the reader will not expect a cool recital of its effects. The delirium of brain-fever brings strange

¹ Put together from The Outlook, February 11, 1899; “Happy Memories of John Ruskin” in the Puritan, May 1900; and “Ruskin and Girlhood” in Scribner’s Magazine, November 1906.

² See chap. xxi. of The Old Curiosity Shop.

³ He had resigned his post as Ruskin’s secretary in 1882, but continued to live at Coniston, and was beginning to achieve distinction as a painter when he died.

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