lecture before "a most brilliant
audience," as the _London Review_ reported, at the Royal Institution
(April 19th, 1861). Carlyle wrote to his brother John:

"Friday last I was persuaded--in fact had inwardly compelled myself
as it were--to a lecture of Ruskin's at the Institution, Albemarle
Street, Lecture on Tree Leaves as physiological, pictorial, moral,
symbolical objects. A crammed house, but tolerable even to me in
the gallery. The lecture was thought to 'break down,' and indeed it
quite did '_as a lecture_'; but only did from _embarras de
richesses_--a rare case. Ruskin did blow asunder as by gunpowder
explosions his leaf notions, which were manifold, curious, genial;
and in fact, I do not recollect to have heard in that place any
neatest thing I liked so well as this chaotic one."

Papers on "Illuminated Manuscripts" (read before the Society of
Antiquaries on June 6th) and on "The Preservation of Ancient Buildings"
(read to the Ecclesiological Society a fortnight later) show that old
interests were not wholly forgotten, even in the stress of new pursuits,
by this man of many-sided activity.

During May, 1861, he paid a visit to the school girls at Winnington, in
June and July he took a holiday at Boulogne with the fisher folk, in
August he went to Ireland as guest of the Latouches of Harristown,
County Kildare, and in September he returned to the Alps, spending the
rest of the year at Bonneville and Lucerne.

CHAPTER II

"MUNERA PULVERIS" (1862)

After an autumn among the Alps, hearing that the Turner drawings in the
National Gallery had been mildewed, he ran home to see about them in
January 1862; and was kept until the end of May. He found that his
political economy work was not such a total failure as it had seemed.
Froude, then editor of _Fraser's Magazine_, thought there was something
in it, and would give him another chance. So, by way of a fresh start,
he had his four _Cornhill_ articles published in book form; and almost
simultaneously, in June 1862 the first of the new series appeared.

The author had then returned to Lucerne with Mr. and Mrs. Burne-Jones,
with whom he crossed the St. Gothard to Milan, where he tried to forget
the harrowing of hell in a close study of Luini, and in copying the "St.
Catherine" now at Oxford. Ruskin has never said so much about Luini as,
perhaps, he intended. A short notice in the "Cestus of Aglaia," and