Before he returned, the secretary of the Chesterfield Art School had written to ask him to address the students.  Mr. Ruskin, travelling without a secretary, and in the flush of new work and thronging ideas, put the letter aside; he carried his letters about in bundles in his portmanteau, as he said in his apology, “and looked at them as Ulysses at the bags of Aeolus.”  Some wag had the impudence to forge a reply, which was actually read at the meeting in spite of its obviously fictitious style and statements: 

     “HARLESDEN(!), LONDON, Friday.

     “MY DEAR SIR,

“Your letter reaches me here.  Have just returned [commercial English, not Ruskin] from Venice [where he had meant to go, but did not go] where I have ruminated(!) in the pasturages of the home of art(!); the loveliest and holiest of lovely and holy cities, where the very stones cry out, eloquent in the elegancies of iambics” (!!)—­and so forth.

However, it deceived the newspapers, and there was a fine storm, which Mr. Ruskin rather enjoyed.  For though the forgery was clumsy enough, it embodied some apt plagiarism from a letter to the Mansfield Art School on a similar occasion.

Not long before, a forgery of a more serious kind had been committed by one of the people connected with St. George’s Guild, who had put Mr. Ruskin’s name to cheques.  The bank authorities were long in tracing the crime.  They even sent a detective to Brantwood to watch one of the assistants, who never knew—­nor will ever know—­that he was honoured with such attentions; and none of his friends for a moment believed him guilty.  He had sometimes imitated Mr. Ruskin’s hand; a dangerous jest.  The real culprit was discovered at last, and Mr. Ruskin had to go to London as a witness for the prosecution.  “Being in very weak health,” the Times report said (April 1st, 1879), “he was allowed to give evidence from the bench.”  He had told the Sheffield communists that “he thought so strongly on the subject of the repression of crime that he dare not give expression to his ideas for fear of being charged with cruelty”; but no sooner was the prisoner released than he gave the help needed to start him again in a better career.

Though he did not feel able to lecture to strangers at Chesterfield, he visited old friends at Eton, on November 6th, 1880, to give an address on Amiens.  For once he forgot his MS., but the lecture was no less brilliant and interesting.  It was practically the first chapter of his new work, the “Bible of Amiens,”—­itself intended as the first volume of “Our Fathers have Told us:  Sketches of the History of Christendom, for Boys and Girls who have been held at its Fonts.”  The distinctly religious tone of the work was noticed as marking, if not a change, a strong development of a tendency which had been strengthening for some time past.