tarted about the middle of April, and on the journey out he wrote,
beside his "Fors" which always went on, a preface to the Rev. R. St.
John Tyrwhitt's "Christian Art and Symbolism." He drew the Apse at Pisa,
half-amused and half-worried by the little ragamuffin who varied the
tedium of watching his work by doing horizontal-bar tricks on the
railings of the Cathedral green. Then to Lucca, where, to show his
friends something of Italian landscape, he took them for rambles through
the olive farms and chestnut woods, among which Miss Hilliard lost her
jewelled cross. Greatly to Ruskin's delight, as a firm believer in
Italian peasant-virtue, it was found and returned without hint of
reward.

At Rome they visited old Mr. Severn, and then went homeward by way of
Verona, where Ruskin wrote an account of the Cavalli monuments for the
Arundel society, and Venice, where he returned to the study of
Carpaccio. At Rome he had been once more to the Sistine, and found that
on earlier visits the ceiling and the Last Judgment had taken his
attention too exclusively. Now that he could look away from Michelangelo
he become conscious of the claims of Botticelli's frescoes, which
represent, in the Florentine school, somewhat the same kind of interest
that he had found in Carpaccio. He became enamoured of Botticelli's
Zipporah, and resolved to study the master more closely. On reaching
home he had to prepare "The Eagle's Nest" for publication; in the
preface he gave special importance to Botticelli, and amplified it in
lectures on early engraving, that Autumn;[27] in which I remember his
quoting with appreciation the passage on the Venus Anadyomene from
Pater's "Studies in the Renaissance" just published.

[Footnote 27: "Ariadne Florentina," delivered on Nov. 2, 9, 16, 23, 30,
and Dec. 7, and repeated on the following Thursdays. Ruskin's first
mention of Botticelli was in the course on Landscape, Lent Term, 1871.]

This sudden enthusiasm about an unknown painter amused the Oxford
public: and it became a standing joke among the profane to ask who was
Ruskin's last great man. It was in answer to that, and in expression of
a truer understanding than most Oxford pupils attained, that Bourdillon
of Worcester wrote on "the Ethereal Ruskin,"--that was Carlyle's name
for him:--

"To us this star or that seems bright,
And oft some headlong meteor's flight
Holds for awhile our raptured sight.

"But he discerns each noble star;