rnbury, 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he collected a mass of then unpublished material about Turner, which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 hel