t St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre, Furnivall distributed to all
comers a reprint of the chapter "On the Nature of Gothic," which we have
already noticed as a statement of the conclusions drawn from the study
of art respecting the conditions under which the life of the workman
should be regulated. Ruskin thus appeared as contributing, so to say,
the manifesto of the movement.

He took charge from the commencement of the drawing-classes--first at 31
Red Lion Square, and afterwards at Great Ormond Street; also
super-intending classes taught by Messrs. Jeffery and E. Cooke at the
Working Women's (afterwards the Working Men and Women's) College, Queen
Square.

In this labour he had two allies; one a friend of Maurice's, Lowes
Dickinson, the well-known artist, whose portrait of Maurice was
mentioned with honour in the "Notes on the Academy"; his portrait of
Kingsley hangs in the hall of the novelist-professor's college at
Cambridge. The other helper was new friend.

To people who know him only as the elegant theorist of art, sentimental
and egotistic, as they will have it, there must be something strange,
almost irreconcilable, in his devotion, week after week and year after
year, to these night-classes. Still more must it astonish them to find
the mystic author of the "Blessed Damozel," the passionate painter of
the "Venus Verticordia," working by Ruskin's side in this rough
navvy-labour of philanthropy.

It was early in 1854 that a drawing of D.G. Rossetti was sent to Ruskin
by a friend of the painter's. The critic already knew Millais and Hunt
personally, but not Rossetti. He wrote kindly, signing himself "yours
respectfully," which amused the young painter. He made acquaintance, and
in the appendix to his Edinburgh Lectures placed Rossetti's name with
those of Millais and Hunt, especially praising their imaginative power,
as rivalling that of the greatest of the old masters.

He did more than this. He agreed to buy, up to a certain sum every year,
any drawings that Rossetti brought him, at their market price; and his
standard of money-value for works of art has never been niggardly. This
sort of help, the encouragement to work, is exactly what makes progress
possible to a young and independent artist; it is better for him than
fortuitous exhibition triumphs--much better than the hack-work which
many have to undertake, to eke out their livelihood. And the mere fact
of being bought by the eminent art-critic was enough to