The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Pleasures of England, by John Ruskin

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Title: The Pleasures of England
Lectures given in Oxford

Author: John Ruskin

Release Date: May 30, 2005 [EBook #15947]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND.

LECTURES GIVEN IN OXFORD.

BY

JOHN RUSKIN, D.C.L., LL.D.,

HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, AND HONORARY FELLOW OF
CORPUS-CHRISTI COLLEGE.

DURING HIS

_SECOND TENURE OF THE SLADE PROFESSORSHIP._

NEW YORK: JOHN WILEY AND SONS. 1888.

* * * * *

CONTENTS

LECTURE I.

THE PLEASURES OF LEARNING. _Bertha to Osburga_ 5

LECTURE II.

THE PLEASURES OF FAITH. _Alfred to the Confessor_ 31

LECTURE III.

THE PLEASURES OF DEED. _Alfred to Coeur de Lion_ 61

LECTURE IV.

THE PLEASURES OF FANCY. _Coeur de Lion to Elizabeth_ 91

* * * * *

LECTURE I.

THE PLEASURES OF LEARNING.

_BERTHA TO OSBURGA._

In the short review of the present state of English Art, given you
last year, I left necessarily many points untouched, and others
unexplained. The seventh lecture, which I did not think it necessary
to read aloud, furnished you with some of the corrective statements
of which, whether spoken or not, it was extremely desirable that you
should estimate the balancing weight. These I propose in the present
course farther to illustrate, and to arrive with you at, I hope,
a just--you would not wish it to be a flattering--estimate of the
conditions of our English artistic life, past and present, in order
that with due allowance for them we may determine, with some security,
what those of us who have faculty ought to do, and those who have
sensibility, to admire.

2. In thus rightly doing and feeling, you will find summed a wider
duty, and granted a greater power, than the moral philosophy at this
moment current with you has ever conceived; and a prospect opened to
you besides, of such a Future for Engla