g great ideas, of affording by the imagination noble grounds
for noble emotion, which, as Ruskin had been writing at Vevey in 1854,
was poetry. Meanwhile the public and the critic ought to become familiar
with the aspects of nature, in order to recognise the difference between
the true poetry of painting, and the mere empty sentimentalism which was
only the rant and bombast of landscape art.

With such feelings as these he wrote the third and fourth volumes of
"Modern Painters," (published respectively January 15 and April 14,
1856). The work was afterwards interrupted only by a recurrence of his
old cough, in the exceptionally cold summer of 1855. He went down to
Tunbridge Wells, where his cousin, William Richardson of Perth, was
practising as a doctor; it was not long before the cough gave way to
treatment, and he was as busy as ever. About October of that year he
wrote to Mrs. Carlyle as follows, in a letter printed by Professor C.E.
Norton, conveniently summing up his year:

"Not that I have not been busy--and very busy, too. I have written,
since May, good six hundred pages, had them rewritten, cut up,
corrected, and got fairly ready for press--and am going to press
with the first of them on Gunpowder Plot day, with a great hope of
disturbing the Public Peace in various directions. Also, I have
prepared above thirty drawings for engravers this year, retouched
the engravings (generally the worst part of the business), and
etched some on steel myself. In the course of the six hundred pages
I have had to make various remarks on German Metaphysics, on
Poetry, Political Economy, Cookery, Music, Geology, Dress,
Agriculture, Horticulture, and Navigation,[6] all of which subjects
I have had to 'read up' accordingly, and this takes time. Moreover,
I have had my class of workmen out sketching every week in the
fields during the summer; and have been studying Spanish proverbs
with my father's partner, who came over from Spain to see the
Great Exhibition. I have also designed and drawn a window for the
Museum at Oxford; and have every now and then had to look over a
parcel of five or six new designs for fronts and backs to the said
Museum.

[Footnote 6: Most of these subjects will be easily recognised in
"Modern Painters," Vols. III. and IV. The "Navigation" refers to
the "Harbours of England."]

"During my