In April, 1871, his cousin, Miss Agnew, who had been seven years at Denmark Hill, was married to Mr. Arthur Severn.  Ruskin, who had added to his other work the additional labour of “Fors Clavigera,” went for a summer’s change to Matlock.  July opened with cold, dry, dark weather, dangerous for out-of-door sketching.  One morning early—­for he was always an early riser—­he took a chill while painting a spray of wild roses before breakfast (the drawing now in the Oxford Schools).  He was already overworked, and it ended in a severe attack of internal inflammation, which nearly cost him his life.  He was a difficult patient to deal with.  The local practitioner who attended him used to tell how he refused remedies, and in the height of the disease asked what would be worst for him.  He took it; and to everybody’s surprise, recovered.[24]

[Footnote 24:  Mrs. Arthur Severn, in a note on the proof, says:  “It was a slice of cold roast beef he hungered for, at Matlock (to our horror, and dear Lady Mount Temple’s, who were nursing him):  there was none in the hotel, and it was late at night; and Albert Goodwin went off to get some, somewhere, or anywhere.  All the hotels were closed; but at last, at an eating-house in Matlock Bath, he discovered some, and came back triumphant with it, wrapped up in paper; and J.R. enjoyed his late supper thoroughly; and though we all waited anxiously till the morning for the result, it had done no harm!  And when he was told pepper was bad for him, he dredged it freely over his food in defiance!  It was directly after our return to Denmark Hill he got Linton’s letter offering him this place (Brantwood).  There are, I believe, ten acres of moor belonging to Brantwood.”  Mr. Albert Goodwin, R.W.S., the landscape painter, travelled, about this time, in Italy with Ruskin.]

During the illness at Matlock his thoughts reverted to the old “Iteriad” times of forty years before, when he had travelled with his parents and cousin Mary from that same “New Bath Hotel,” where he was now lying, to the Lakes; and again he wearied for “the heights that look adown upon the dale.  The crags are lone on Coniston.”  If he could only lie down there, he said, he should get well again.

He had not fully recovered before he heard that W.J.  Linton, the poet and wood-engraver, wished to sell a house and land at the very place:  L1,500, and it could be his.  Without question asked he bought it at once; and as it would be impossible to lecture at Oxford so soon after his illness, he set off, before the middle of September, with his friends the Hilliards to visit his new possession.  They found a rough-cast country cottage, old, damp, decayed; smoky chimneyed and rat-riddled; but “five acres of rock and moor and streamlet; and,” he wrote, “I think the finest view I know in Cumberland or Lancashire, with the sunset visible over the same.”