buildings in France and Italy, and copy pictures. An exhibition of these drawings was held at the Fine Art Society in May 1886. Most of them are now at Sheffield. Ruskin also sent to the museum, largely at his own cost, a collection of minerals and precious stones, architectural casts, drawings by himself and others, and a few manuscripts. The collection, admirably catalogued and arranged by its second curator, Mr. William White, attracts many visitors; it contains a series of examples illustrating Ruskin's point of view in many arts, and his ideas of the true function of local museums. St. George's schools were to be another institution in what Ruskin sometimes called his 'island of Barataria.' For he was not always quite so serious as his disciples supposed. It is not reported that he received with unmixed gratitude the homage of a disciple who spent most of his time in traversing the country with his own letters for delivery by foot, in order to discountenance the accursed railway system. Ruskin did not establish the schools which he sketched out very attractively in 'Fors.' But he wrote a prosody for use in them, and edited a 'Shepherd's Library.' Of more immediate applicability were the May Queen and Rose Queen festivals, which he established in some existing schools with characteristic generosity and ingenuity in graceful ordinance. He took much trouble in corresponding with the queens of his crowning (Saint George, October 1900). Ruskin was also the inspirer and the first president of 'The Art for Schools Association,' a body which has done extensive work in circulating high-class pictures among the elementary schools.
Ruskin's practical contributions towards establishing Utopia were suggestive in many directions rather than conclusive in any. In judging them, it should be remembered that the years in which he entered upon the role of social reformer were also those in which he was working himself almost to death at Oxford. In 1870 a professorship of fine arts (endowed by Felix Slade [q. v.] ) was for the first time established at Oxford, and Ruskin accepted a call to create the part of art professor. The work which he put into it was enormous. In the first place he delivered a long series of lectures: eleven courses (1870–7), two courses (1883–4). Eight of his later works (enumerated in the bibliography below), several of them including illustrations specially prepared, were written as Oxford lectures. On these he took greater pains, he said, than on any of his other books, and in them he revised and recast in the light of maturer knowledge the whole body of his art-teaching. The inaugural course is the final and most compact of all his statements on the fundamental canons of art. He was at the same time engaged in preparing handbooks (never completed) on geology ('Deucalion') and botany ('Proserpina'). Ruskin was not in sympathy or touch with the scientific movement of his time. But he had an extraordinary gift for observation. He used to say that he might, if he had chosen, have become the first geologist in Europe. His interest in geology and mineralogy was constant, and he anticipated in 1863 some of the modifications since made in the glacier theories of the day. For an instance of Ruskin's acute observation, mingled with fancy and poetry, the reader may refer to his description of the swallow in 'Love's Meinie.'
Ruskin conceived it to be a further part of his professorial duty 'to give what assistance I may to travellers in Italy.' The result was a series of guide-books to Venice, Florence, and Amiens (see bibliography below, 35, 39, 40, and 46). For the purpose of these books, as also of fresh illustrations for his lectures, Ruskin made several continental journeys, devoting special study to the works of Botticelli and Carpaccio. Ruskin also founded a drawing school at Oxford, to which he presented many valuable works of art. He endowed a drawing master, giving 5,000l. to the university for this purpose, and devoted long days to arranging series of examples (including many sketches of his own made for this purpose) and cataloguing them. Ruskin taught in the school, but very few undergraduates attended. His lectures, on the other hand, were crowded. For his first lecture (8 Feb. 1870), announced for the museum, the crowd was so great that an adjournment had to be made to the Sheldonian theatre. 'I have heard him lecture several times,' says Mr. Mallock, 'and that singular voice of his, which would often hold all the theatre breathless, haunts me still sometimes. There was something strange and aerial in its exquisite modulations that seemed as if it came from a disconsolate spirit hovering over the waters of Babylon and remembering Sion.' (For impressions of Ruskin's Oxford lectures see Cook's Studies in Ruskin and Century Mag. February 1898.)
Ruskin also devoted much time to cultivating the friendship of individual members of the university. In April 1871 he was admitted an honorary fellow of Corpus. His rooms—on the first floor right of No. 2 stair-
