recovering from his illness, back at Coniston,
after a short visit to Liverpool. It was forbidden to him to attempt any
exciting work. He had given up "Fors" and Oxford lecturing, and was
devoting himself again to quiet studies for "Proserpina" and
"Deucalion." On the first day of the trial the St. George's Guild was
registered as a Company; on the second day he wrote to Miss Beever:

"I have entirely resigned all hope of ever thanking you rightly for
bread, sweet odours, roses and pearls, and must just allow myself
to be fed, scented, rose-garlanded and be-pearled, as if I were a
poor little pet dog, or pet pig. But my cold is better, and I _am_
getting on with this botany; but it is really too important a work
to be pushed for a week or fortnight."

Early in 1879 his resignation of the Slade Professorship was announced;
followed by what was virtually his election to an honorary doctor's
degree; or, as officially worded--"the Hebdomadal Council resolved on
June 9, 1879, to propose to Convocation to confer the degree of D.C.L.
_honoris causa_ upon John Ruskin, M.A., of Ch. Ch., at the enaenia of
that year; but the proposal, though notified in the _Gazette_ of June
10, was not submitted to vote owing to the inability of Mr. Ruskin to be
present at the encaenia." The degree was conferred, in his absence, in
1893.

CHAPTER VI

THE DIVERSIONS OF BRANTWOOD (1879-1881)

Sixty years of one of the busiest lives on record were beginning to tell
upon Ruskin. He would not confess to old age, but his recent illness had
shaken him severely. The next three years were spent chiefly at
Coniston, in comparative retirement; but neither in despair, nor
idleness, nor loneliness. He had always lived a sort of dual life,
solitary in his thoughts, but social in his habits; liking company,
especially of young people; ready, in the intervals of work, to enter
into their employments and amusements, and curiously able to forget his
cares in hours of relaxation. Sometimes, when earnest admirers made the
pilgrimage to their Mecca--"holy Brantwood" as a scoffing poet called
it--they were surprised and even shocked, to find the prophet of "Fors"
at the head of a merry dinner-table, and the Professor of Art among
surroundings which a London or a Boston "aesthete" would have ruled to
be in very poor taste.

Shall I take you for a visit there,--to Brantwood as it was in those old
times?

It is a weary way