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The writing suggests that the two sets of comments were made at different times. Ruskin clearly had this notebook with him in Edinburgh on August 25th 1850. There was little space left, so it seems possible that he took it to work on the Venetian notes. The left hand side of the preceding page, Notebook M2 p.185L, seems to have been written in Edinburgh, but the right hand side clearly refers to Bourges and appears to have been an account of his immediate impressions, and so to have been written there. Notebook M2 p.186 is much more general in its comments. The references to Jeremiah in the first of the notes on Notebook M2 p.186L are clearly related to Notebook M2 p.186. The second note, on the Edinburgh sermons, written in Edinburgh, is continued on Notebook M2 pp.187L and 187. The implication is that the material on Notebook M2 p.186, and the related comments on Jeremiah, were written before the commentary on the sermons (and the almost post-modernist use there of the term ‘discourse’).
The references to Bacon and to Jeremiah are important for the moral argument of Stones of Venice. It appears to have been in Bourges at Notebook M2 p.176, and in this passage on Notebook M2 pp.186L and 186, that Ruskin returned to the moral analysis of architecture which was important to him on October 7th in Dijon and in the working out of the moral, social, and political thrust of Stones of Venice. On October 6th Ruskin had set out the arguments from structural efficiency, and Ruskin returns to that theme with the reference to the structural weakness of the Chinese cupola. It does seem, though, that the two notions are simply juxtaposed, two separate and parallel discourses that do not meet.
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[Version 0.05: May 2008]