brought up. Only I was too ignorant to see, till he showed me, that the virtue of real pre-Raphaelite draughtsmanship was in faithfulness to natural form, and resulting sensitiveness to harmony of line; nothing to do with sham mediævalism and hard contours.

By-and-by he promoted me to Burne-Jones's "Psyche received into Heaven." What rapture at the start, and what trials before that facsimile was completed! And when all was done, "That's not the way to draw a foot," said a popular artist who saw the copy. But that was the way to use the pure line, and who but Ruskin taught it at the time?

Later, he set painful tasks of morsels from Turner, distasteful at first, but gradually fascinating; for he would not let one off before getting at the bottom of the affair, whether it was merely a knock-in of the balanced colour-masses or the absolute imitation of the little wavy clouds, an eighth of an inch long, left apparently ragged by the mezzotinter's scraper. All this does not make a professional picture-painter, but such teaching must have opened many pupils' eyes to certain points in art not universally perceived.

That was one leg of the chair; another was the literary leg. He contemplated his "Bibliotheca Pastorum," anticipating in a different form the best hundred books, only there were to be far less. The first, as suited in his mind for country readers on St. George's farms, was the "Economist" of Xenophon, and two of his undergraduate friends undertook the translation. Of these, Wedderburn of Balliol, now K.C., and Ruskin's literary executor, was one; and the other was Montefiore of Balliol, who was already in weak health (he did not live long after those days) and passed on his share in the work to me. That was the beginning of many interesting afternoons in Ruskin's rooms, where I read my bit of translation to him, and he compared it with the Greek, revising and Ruskinising the schoolboy exercise. His method of translation was quite new to me. The Greek was not to be so turned into English as to lose its Greek flavour; one should know it for a rendering out of a foreign tongue. The same word in Greek was to be represented by the same word in English. He would have no more "freedom" in this than in anything else. But he came down heavily on all the catchwords and commonplaces dear to Bohn's cribs, and for a phrase like "to boot" had no mercy. On the other hand, he invented quaint renderings of his own, such as "courtesy" for philanthropia. The book is still in print for the curious to read; he gave his translators the profits: "It will keep you in raspberry jam," he said, and I have had a postal order for my share regularly these nearly thirty years. But the lesson one learns at school in Latin, how to make mosaic of words and decorative patterns of phrases, no master ever tried to teach me in English, as Ruskin taught it over the tea-cups in those afternoons at Corpus.

There was a third leg to the chair, which we might call the dignity of labour. When his first group of men would not draw, he made them dig at Hinksey. I was slack at the Hinksey diggings, but he made me dig at Coniston. When the Xenophon was nearly ready, the translators were asked to Brantwood in the summer of 1875 to finish it. At my earliest visit, two years before, he had no harbour; the boats were exposed to the big waves from the south-west storms, and it was an almost daily task for the gardeners to keep them aground on the shore and to bale them. In '74 he began some harbour-works, which we were set to complete. We dug and built every afternoon, and enjoyed it, though we had not time to finish the job. After us the local mason was called in, so that the harbour you now see is professional work. But he bade them leave three of my steps standing as a monument of that summer's doings, and there they are to this day.

It seemed a kind of joke to make Oxford men dig, and I think the Hinksey work was devised partly in despair of otherwise holding his class together. But he had reasons for accustoming them to the labour by which far the greater part of humanity has to live. Not to make them into navvies, but to give them a respect for the skilled use of a pick and a trowel, was his intention; just as the drawing school was not to make them artists, but to show them how hard it was. In his own undergraduate days the yokel and the mob were outside the pale of the gownsman's interests. There was condescending charity, of course, and comradeship in sport with the keeper and the groom; but "your real gentleman," said Byron, "never perspires." On the contrary, said Ruskin, when Adam delved, in the sweat of his brow, life was nearest to Eden-gates. "To draw hard breath over ploughshare and spade" was the glory of living. And so, to make these youngsters dig was an object-lesson in ethics, the first rudiments of human fellowship, which branched upward into all the moralities.

A fourth leg to his chair was nature study. In those days "science" was supposed to be the only true natural history: Gilbert White was out of date. Ruskin's teaching was a protest, and it has prevailed.

From any master we learn no more than we are capable of learning, and he never gave me many of the tasks he put upon others of his pupils. Less for any use he made of it, but always with the suggestion that it was for a practical end, he set me to draw glaciers and glaciated rocks at Chamouni; on the Coniston fells demonstrated his method of taking dip and strike from any bit of rock showing cleavage and stratification, and on his own piece of moor made me survey and elaborate a model to scale. It was treated as a form of sport, enjoyable as any game; but not to be scamped. There was always the insistence on accuracy above all things, and fulness of observation, with care about trifles which I had not dreamed of before, and never expected from him. It was only much later that I understood, from his note-books and sketch-books, what an immense amount of dry, hard work underlay the easy eloquence of his paragraphs. For instance, "Love's Meinie" seems to be a slight performance; but to serve for it he had a vast collection of unstuffed bird-skins, and to get at the secret of flight planned and commissioned from a skilled artificer sets of quill-feathers, enormously magnified, in exact imitation of the true forms and proportions in the bird's wing. One of these is on view in the Coniston museum, which holds so many of his relics; a complete set are still at Brantwood. To show the village children how the wheels of heaven go round, and how the stars have been grouped into pictures of the world—old myths of nature, he planned a revolving globe into which you could climb and see a blue sky pierced for the greater and the lesser lights, and painted with the constellation figures. The globe has perished, but the object-lesson in education remains.

I have mentioned four lines of his teaching, four legs to his chair. Other traits of his many-sided mind are given in the following chapters, and even these are not exhaustive. They will serve to show him as he was seen at close quarters, not merely through the medium of print—the last of the sages, lingering into an era of specialists. I do not rate him as an infallible authority, neither in taste, nor in ethics, nor in anything. But he was a great teacher, because he took you by the hand as he went on his voyage of discovery through the world; he made you see what he saw, and taught you to look for yourself.

One thing he never taught me was to keep a diary. He used to lament how many beautiful sunsets he had not sketched, and how many interesting facts he had lost for want of the scratch of a pencil. In trying to recall these bygones one begins to perceive their loss: so little one can save from the wreckage of time. Once, when his talk was rather confidential, I said,