me of his ideals of education. He had long felt that mere
talking about Art was a makeshift, and that no real insight could be got
into the subject without actual and practical dealing with it. He found
a South Kensington School in existence at Oxford, with an able master,
Mr. Alexander Macdonald; and though he did not entirely approve of the
methods in use, tried to make the best of the materials to his hand,
accepting but enlarging the scope of the system. The South Kensington
method had been devised for industrial designing, primarily; Ruskin's
desire was to get undergraduates to take up a wider subject, to
familiarise themselves with the technical excellences of the great
masters, to study nature, and the different processes of art,--drawing,
painting and some forms of decorative work, such as, in especial,
goldsmiths' work, out of which the Florentine school had sprung. He did
not wish to train artists, but, as before in the Working Men's College,
to cultivate the habit of mind that looks at nature and life, not
analytically, as science does, but for the sake of external aspect and
expression. By these means he hoped to breed a race of judicious patrons
and critics, the best service any man can render to the cause of art.

And so he got together a mass of examples in addition to the Turners
which he had already given to the University galleries. He placed in the
school a few pictures by Tintoret, some drawings by Rossetti, Holman
Hunt, and Burne-Jones, and a great number of fine casts and engravings.
He arranged a series of studies by himself and others, as "copies,"
fitted, like the Turners in the National Gallery, with sliding frames
in cabinets for convenient reference and removal. After spending most of
his first Lent Term in this work, he went home for a month to prepare a
catalogue, which was published the same year: the school not being
finally opened until October, 1871. During these first visits to Oxford
he was the guest of Sir Henry Acland; on April 29, 1871, Professor
Ruskin, already honorary student of Christ Church, was elected to an
honorary fellowship at Corpus, and enabled to occupy rooms, vacated by
the Rev. Henry Furneaux, who gave up his fellowship on marrying Mr.
Arthur Severn's twin-sister.[22]

[Footnote 22: His rooms were in Fellows' buildings, No. 2 staircase,
first floor right.]

After this work well begun, he went abroad for a vacation tour with a
party of friends--as in 1866; Lady Trev