resent exhibited in the National Gallery," so that his plan was
practically fulfilled.

During 1858 Ruskin continued to lecture at various places on subjects
connected with his Manchester addresses--the relation of art to
manufacture, and especially the dependence of all great architectural
design upon sculpture or painting of organic form. The first of the
series was given at the opening of the Architectural Museum at South
Kensington, January 13th, 1858, entitled "The Deteriorative Power of
Conventional Art over Nations;" in which he showed that naturalism, as
opposed to meaningless pattern-making, was always a sign of life. For
example, the strength of the Greek, Florentine and Venetian art arose
out of the search for truth, not, as it is often supposed, out of
striving after an ideal of beauty; and as soon as nature was superseded
by recipe, the greatest schools hastened to their fall. From which he
concluded that modern design should always be founded on natural form,
rather than upon the traditional patterns of the east or of the
mediaevals.

On February 16th he spoke on "The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art and
Policy," at Tunbridge Wells; a subject similar to that of his address to
the St. Martin's School of the year before, but amplified into a plea
for the use of wrought-iron ornament, as in the new Oxford Museum, then
building, and on April 25th he again addressed St. Martin's School.

The Oxford Museum was an experiment in the true Gothic revival. The
architects, Sir Thomas Deane and Benjamin Woodward, had allowed their
workmen to design parts of the detail, such as capitals and spandrils,
quite in the spirit of Ruskin's teaching, and the work was accordingly
of deep interest to him. So far back as April, 1856, he had given an
address to the men employed at the Museum, whom he met, on Dr. Acland's
invitation, at the Workmen's Reading Rooms. He said that his object was
not to give some labouring men the chance of becoming masters of other
labouring men, and to help the few at the expense of the many, but to
lead them to those sources of pleasure, and power over their own minds
and hands, that more educated people possess. He did not sympathize with
the socialism that had been creeping into vogue since 1848. He thought
existing social arrangements good, and he agreed with his friends, the
Carlyles, who had found that it was only the incapable who could not get
work. But it was the fault of the wealthy and educat