xxvi INTRODUCTION

Such were Ruskin’s thoughts, as they were revealed to intimate friends, at this period. In general society he was as eager and enthusiastic, often also as gay, as ever. The very pressure of sad thoughts and his disinclination to sustained mental labour made him the readier to give and receive pleasure by mixing among his friends. He called often upon Carlyle and upon Miss Jean Ingelow. He saw something of Manning, whom he took to see Burne-Jones’s pictures.¹ He had a warm liking for his “darling Cardinal,” though he found the Papal pretensions as light as the Cardinal’s puff pastry: “you had but to breathe upon it and it was nowhere.”² A friendship of a different kind which became intimate at this time was with the Royal Academician, Stacy Marks. Ruskin had made his acquaintance some years before, and early in 1876 wrote at Marks’s invitation a notice of the works of Frederick Walker.³ Henceforward Ruskin saw a good deal of Marks, and found much pleasure in his jovial society.

A letter to Mrs. Arthur Severn, undated, but belonging to the year 1876, reveals the Professor in an unfamiliar scene. He was staying with one of his Oxford pupils (Dr. Dawtrey Drewitt), and enjoyed a close sight of the hounds:-

“(PEPPERING, ARUNDEL.)-It has been a bright day! really lovely !! and I’ve been out with the hounds! ! !-only-on foot. But there was a meet on the Downs, and Dawtrey drove Lucy and Alice and me; and Papa and Helen rode, and for inconceivable wonder, I was lucky for them, for first the hounds and riders came down a lovely two miles of dingle and glen in front of us-with shadows across from bright sunshine, then they reached a piece of wood close to us.

“How difficult it is to explain anything [sketch]. D is high open down; V, a steep valley in it; C, copse on side of valley; A, Alice and Lucy and Dawtrey and me on foot, looking on.

“The hounds searched the copse at C, right opposite, on the face of the hill. Drove the fox out at B. The black thing is the fox, with his tail behind him. As soon as he got off, we ran up the hill to D, and were just in time to see him cross the down, where the big dots are, as if he meant to go up the valley, V. Instead of that, he turned and came down J, throwing dogs and men all out at the steep hill at X, came down to his own wood, ran into it, doubled, and got out again, leaving all the dogs in the wood, went up the valley again, and came across right in front of us, still at D, and

¹ See Memorials of Edward Burne-Jones, vol. ii. p. 61.

² Hortus Inclusus (a letter of a somewhat later date, reprinted in a later volume).

³ Printed in Vol. XIV. pp. 339-348.

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