biography—­“five years’ work for you,” says the old man, full of plans for gathering material.  But when one scandal after another reached his ears, he changed his tone, and suggested dropping personal details, and giving a “Life of his Art,” in the intended third and final volume of “Modern Painters.”  Something of the sort was done in the Edinburgh Lectures and at the close of vol. v. of “Modern Painters”:  and the official life was left to Walter Thornbury, with which Mr. Ruskin perhaps did not wish to interfere.  But he collected a mass of then unpublished material about Turner, which goes far to prove that the kindly view he took of the strange man’s morbid and unhappy life was not without justification.  At the time, so many legal complications developed that Ruskin was advised to resign his executorship; later on he was able to fulfil its duties as he conceived them, in arranging Turner’s sketches for the National Gallery.

Others of his old artist-friends were now passing away.  Early in January Mr. J.J.  Ruskin called on William Hunt and found him feeble:  “I like the little Elshie,” he says, nicknaming him after the Black Dwarf, for Hunt was somewhat deformed: 

“He is softened and humanized.  There is a gentleness and a greater bonhomie—­less reserve.  I had sent him ‘Pre-Raphaelitism.’  He had marked it very much with pencil.  He greatly likes your notice of people not keeping to their last.  So many clever artists, he says, have been ruined by not acting on your principles.  I got a piece of advice from Hunt,—­never to commission a picture.  He could not have done my pigeon so well had he felt he was doing it for anybody.”

The pigeon was a drawing he had just bought; in later years at Brantwood.

In February 1852 a dinner-party was given to celebrate in his absence John Ruskin’s thirty-third birthday.

“On Monday, 9th, we had Oldfield (Newton was in Wales), Harrison, George Richmond, Tom, Dr. Grant, and Samuel Prout.  The latter I never saw in such spirits, and he went away much satisfied.  Yesterday at church we were told that he came home very happy, ascended to his painting-room, and in a quarter of an hour from his leaving our cheerful house was a corpse, from apoplexy.  He never spoke after the fit came on.  He had always wished for a sudden death.”

Next year, in November, 1853, he tells of a visit paid, by John’s request, to W.H.  Deverell, the young Pre-Raphaelite, whom he found “in squalor and sickness—­with his Bible open—­and not long to live—­while Howard abuses his picture at Liverpool.”

Early in 1852 Charles Newton was going to Greece on a voyage of discovery, and wanted John Ruskin to go with him.  But the parents would not hear of his adventuring himself at sea “in those engine-vessels.”  So Newton went alone, and “dug up loads of Phoenician antiquities.”  One cannot help regretting that Ruskin lost this opportunity of familiarizing himself with the early Greek art which, twenty years later he tried to expound.  For the time he was well enough employed on the “Stones of Venice.”  He tells the story of this ten months’ stay in a letter to his venerable friend Rogers the poet, dated June 23 (1852).