at Denmark Hill.  My first reason for this, is affection for the old house:—­my second, want of room;—­my third, the incompatibility of hammering, washing, and experimenting on stones with cleanliness in my stores of drawings.  And my fourth is the power I shall have, when I want to do anything very quietly, of going up the hill and thinking it out in the old garden, where your greenhouse still stands, and the aviary—­without fear of interruption from callers.

“It may perhaps amuse you, in hours which otherwise would be listless, to think over what may be done with the old house.  I have ordered it at once to be put in proper repair by Mr. Snell; but for the furnishing, I can give no directions at present:  it is to be very simple, at all events, and calculated chiefly for museum work and for stores of stones and books:  and you really must not set your heart on having it furnished like Buckingham Palace.

“I have bought to-day, for five pounds, the front of the porch of the Church of St. James.  It was going to be entirely destroyed.  It is worn away, and has little of its old beauty; but as a remnant of the Gothic of Abbeville—­as I happen to be here—­and as the church was dedicated to my father’s patron saint (as distinct from mine) I’m glad to have got it.  It is a low arch—­with tracery and niches, which ivy, and the Erba della Madonna, will grow over beautifully, wherever I rebuild it.”

At Abbeville he had with him as usual his valet Crawley; and as before he sent for Downes the gardener, to give him a holiday, and to enjoy his raptures over every new sight.  C.E.  Norton came on a short visit, and Ruskin followed him to Paris, where he met the poet Longfellow (October 7).  At last on Monday, 19th October, he wrote: 

“Only a line to-day, for I am getting things together, and am a little tired, but very well, and glad to come home, though much mortified at having failed in half my plans, and done nothing compared to what I expected.  But it is better than if I were displeased with all I had done.  It isn’t Turner—­and it isn’t Correggio—­it isn’t even Prout—­but it isn’t bad.”

Returning home, he gave an account of his autumn’s work in the lecture at the Royal Institution, January 29th, 1869, on the “Flamboyant Architecture of the Valley of the Somme.”  This lecture was not then published in full:  but part of the original text is printed in the third chapter of the work we have next to notice, “The Queen of the Air.”

CHAPTER IX

“THE QUEEN OF THE AIR” (1869)

In spite of a “classical education” and the influence of Aristotle upon the immature art-theories of his earlier works, Ruskin was known, in his younger days, as a Goth, and the enemy of the Greeks.  When he began life, his sense of justice made him take the side of Modern Painters against classical tradition.  Later on, when considering the great questions of education and the aims of life, he entirely set aside the common routine of Greek and Latin grammar as the all-in-all of culture.  But this was not because he shared Carlyle’s contempt for classical studies.