st: "_Perge, perge_;--and, as the Irish
say, 'more power to your elbow!' I have yet read this 'Val d'Arno' only
once. Froude snatched it away from me yesterday; and it has then to go
to my brother at Dumfries. After that I shall have it back...."

[Footnote 31: On Mondays and Thursdays, Oct. 21, 23, 27, 30, Nov. 3, 6,
10, 13, 17, 20; repeated on the Wednesdays and Fridays following.]

During that summer and autumn Ruskin suffered from nights of
sleeplessness or unnaturally vivid dreams and days of unrest and
feverish energy, alternating with intense fatigue. The eighteen lectures
in less than six weeks, a "combination of prophecy and play-acting," as
Carlyle had called it in his own case, and the unfortunate discussion
with an old-fashioned economist who undertook to demolish Ruskinism
without understanding it, added to the causes of which we are already
aware, brought him to New Year, 1874, in "failing strength, care, and
hope." He sought quiet at the seaside, but found modern hotel-life
intolerable; he went back to town and tried the pantomimes for
distraction,--saw Kate Vaughan in Cinderella, and Violet Cameron in Jack
in the Box, over and over again, and found himself:

"Now hopelessly a man of the world!--of that woeful outside one, I
mean. It is now Sunday; half-past eleven in the morning. Everybody
else is gone to church--and I am left alone with the cat, in the
world of sin."

Thinking himself better, he went to Oxford, and announced a course on
Alpine form; but after a week was obliged to retreat and go home to
Coniston, still hoping to return and give his lectures. But it was no
use. The gloom without deepened the gloom within; and he took the wisest
course in trying Italy, alone this time with his old servant Crawley.

The greater part of 1874 was spent abroad--first travelling through
Savoy and by the Riviera to Assisi, where he wrote to Miss S. Beever:

"The Sacristan gives me my coffee for lunch in his own little cell,
looking out on the olive woods; then he tells me stories of
conversions and miracles, and then perhaps we go into the sacristy
and have a reverent little poke-out of relics. Fancy a great carved
cupboard in a vaulted chamber full of most precious things (the
box which the Holy Virgin's veil used to be kept in, to begin
with), and leave to rummage in it at will! Things that are only
shown twice in the year or so, with fumiga