o scenery;
a question upon which he had some right to be heard, as knowing more
about scenery than most geologists, and more about geology than most
artists.

As examples of Savoy mountains this lecture described in detail the
Saleve, on which he had been living for two winters, and the Brezon, the
top of which he had tried to buy from the commune of Bonneville--one of
his many plans for settling among the Alps. The commune thought he had
found a gold-mine up there, and raised the price out of all reason.
Other attempts to make a home in the chateaux or chalets of Savoy were
foiled, or abandoned, like his earlier idea to live in Venice. But his
scrambles on the Saleve led him to hesitate in accepting the explanation
given by Alphonse Favre of the curious north-west face of steeply
inclined vertical slabs, which he suspected to be created by cleavage,
on the analogy of other Jurassic precipices. The Brezon--_brisant_,
breaking wave--he took as type of the billowy form of limestone Alps in
general, and his analysis of it was serviceable and substantially
correct.

This lecture was followed in 1864 by desultory correspondence with Mr.
Jukes and others in _The Reader_, in which he merely restated his
conclusions, too slightly to convince. Had he devoted himself to a
thorough examination of the subject--but this is in the region of what
might have been. He was more seriously engaged in other pursuits, of
more immediate importance. Three days after his lecture he was being
examined before the Royal Academy Commission, and after a short summer
visit to various friends in the north of England, he set out again for
the Alps, partly to study the geology of Chamouni and North Switzerland,
partly to continue his drawings of Swiss towns at Baden and Lauffenburg,
with his pupil John Bunney. But even there the burden of his real
mission could not be shaken off, and though again seeking health and a
quiet mind, he could not quite keep silence, but wrote letters to
English newspapers on the depreciation of gold (repeating his theory of
currency), and on the wrongs of Poland and Italy; and he put together
more papers, not then published, in continuation of his "Munera
Pulveris."

Since about 1850, Carlyle had been gradually becoming more and more
friendly with John Ruskin; and now that this social and economical work
had been taken up, he began to have a real esteem for him, though always
with a patronizing tone, which the younger ma