INTRODUCTION xxi

and 1876 was for him comparatively light. In March 1875 he lectured at the Royal Institution on Glaciers;¹ and in November at Oxford on the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds.² In the spring of the following year he lectured at the London Institution on Stones,³ repeating the lecture, no doubt with modifications, at Christ’s Hospital and Woolwich. For the rest, he spent most of the time at Brantwood, paying, however, several visits and also taking some driving tours.

Of his visits, one was of peculiar importance to Ruskin’s mental and spiritual life. This was to Mr. and Mrs. Cowper Temple (afterwards Lord and Lady Mount Temple) at Broadlands. Mrs. Cowper Temple, the filh of Sesame and Lilies⁴ and of his intimate letters, had been the confidante of Ruskin’s romance, and when the end came she begged him to visit her and let her surround him with the affection as of a mother’s care. “It is so precious to me,” he wrote in reply (Brantwood, August 10, 1875), “to be thought of as a child and needing to be taken care of, in the midst of the weary sense of teaching and having all things and creatures depending on one,-and one’s self, a nail stuck in an insecure place.” So he went to Broadlands, and his friends interested themselves in his pursuits, as he relates in letters to Mrs. Arthur Severn:-

“(October 8.)-I am beginning to feel that it is right I should be here. Botany and Polit. Econ. will be all the more complete for being worked in this garden and under such trees, and with Lord Palmerston’s library for reference-and the perfect quiet of the Park view with its long avenue, and no railroad sights or whistle, is very good for me. I gathered a rose and a piece of Oxford weed and sent them in by Juliet to Isola⁵ this morning, and I’m going to give her a feather I’m going to draw to-day, out of her hen’s breast-picked up in poultry yard yesterday, for my first St. George’s lesson.”⁶

“(October 20.)-Things are going nicely with me-filh has an angelic cook ... who does everything I want, and we’re making experiments on the glaciers, in the kitchen with jelly and cream and blanc-mange, and I got two quite terrific crevasses opened to-day which William and filh were there to see.”

¹ See Deucalion, i., parts of chaps. ii., iii., and iv.

² Vol. XXII. pp. 493 seq.

³ See Deucalion, i., ch. vii.

⁴ Vol. XVIII. p. 47.

⁵ “Isola” (like filh), a name for Lady Mount Temple; Juliet, her adopted daughter.

⁶ See the feather engraved at the bottom of Plate I. in Laws of Fésole (Vol. XV. p. 367).

[Version 0.04: March 2008]