after all, was about to smile upon him. Her family had
their own reasons for promoting the match, and all united in hastening
on the event.

In the Notes to Exhibitions added to a new edition of "Modern Painters,"
then in the Press, the author mentions a "hurried visit to Scotland in
the spring" of 1848. This was the occasion of his marriage at Perth, on
April 10. The young couple spent rather more than a fortnight on the way
South, among Scotch and English lakes, intending to make a more extended
tour in the summer to the cathedrals and abbeys.

The pilgrimage began with Salisbury, where a few days' sketching in the
damp and draughts of the cathedral laid the bridegroom low, and brought
the tour to an untimely end. In August, the young people were seen
safely off to Normandy, where they went by easy stages from town to
town, studying the remains of Gothic building. In October they returned
and settled in a house of their own, at 31, Park Street, where during
the winter he wrote "The Seven Lamps of Architecture," and, as a bit of
by-work, a notice of Samuel Prout for the _Art Journal._

This was Ruskin's first illustrated volume. The plates were engraved by
himself in soft-ground etching, such as Prout had used, from drawings he
had made in 1846 and 1848. Some are scrappy combinations of various
detail, but others, such as the Byzantine capital, the window in
Giotto's Campanile, the arches from St. Lo in Normandy, from St. Michele
at Lucca, and from the Ca' Foscari at Venice, are effective studies of
the actual look of old buildings, seen as they are shown us in Nature,
with her light and the shade added to all the facts of form, and her own
last touches in the way of weather-softening, and settling-faults, and
tufted, nestling plants.

Revisiting the Hotel de la Cloche at Dijon in later years, Ruskin showed
me the room where he had "bitten" the last plate in his wash-hand basin,
as a careless makeshift for the regular etcher's bath. He was not
dissatisfied with his work himself; the public of the day wanted
something more finished. So the second edition appeared with the
subjects elaborately popularized in fashionable engraving. More recently
they have undergone reduction for a cheap issue. But any book lover
knows the value of the original "Seven Lamps" with its San Miniato cover
and autograph plates.

As to its reception, or at least the anticipation of it. Charlotte
Bronte bears witness in a letter to the publi