The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1884-11-29 00:00:00

MR. RUSKIN AT OXFORD.

Mr. Ruskin did not deliver the sixth of his series
of lectures on "The Pleasures of England" in the
Lecture Theatre of the University Museum, Oxford,
on Saturday. The subject in the syllabus was
" Atheism : The Pleasures of Sense." The professor
said he believed that, although they differed from him
in sundry points recently submitted to them, that day
they could not but agree with him in this, that the
efforts of a paltry British press to reduce lectures pre-
pared only for their hearing to the level of its own
understanding, had reduced the reports of his lectures,
on which so many of them were unfortunately depen-
dent, into a mass of heterogeneous rabble, out of
which it was hopeless to advance a step further.
With their permission; therefore, he did not
propose for a week or two to deliver the
lectures on "Atheism " and "Mechanism," the details
of which had so far fluttered the dovecots of the
vivisectionists that they were prepared, if possible, to
exercise their newly-acquired rights of the franchise
in an encounter with their single-handed antagonist.
He hoped to content them that day with some general
cleanings up and putting to rights, before going into
the series again. In the first place, there was a great
mistake in most of the papers about the names of the
ships he had mentioned in his last lecture, and the re-
porters had become confused between the names of
the ships and the gentlemen who commanded. The
names of the ships he mentioned were the Captain,
which most of them had forgotten, the London, and
the Eurydice. The latter was a wooden ship—a
frigate—and was blown over on her beam ends by one
of those fearful blasts which he had described in his
essay on winds, but in all the pictures that he had
seen of her she was represented as carrying too
much sail—too much sail for a windy day. He
had reason also to think that her lower deck doors
were open. He did not dwell upon that. His own
feeling was that she was carrying too much sail in the
pride of her beauty, and, in the modern practice, going
; as fast and as dangerously as they could to places
, where they had nothing to do, and where they
did not know what to do once they had got there.
The Captain was an iron ship, known to be top-
heavy, and sent to sea in spite of warning to that
effect. She was caught in the Bay of Biscay, and
simply turned bottom upwards, and went down
. straight, the shrieks of the engineers being heard by
' two or three of the crew who escaped, as the coals
fell upon them red and hot from the furnaces. There
was nothing in all the annals of naval disasters so
acute and so horrible as that. The London simply sank
hopelessly and quickly from under her passengers,
because she was waterlogged and the sea dashtd over
her decks. Why, any fishing smack would have been
perfectly safe in the same position. He would
add to those three naval disasters a much more
antecedent one that of the Royal George.
which was sunk with the greater part of her
crew, while the captain was writing in his cabin,
in the harbour, because a few of her crew were hunt-
ing rats half a minute too long in her hull. They had
thus four accurate illustrations of a kind of ship
building and ship management of which there was no
parallel whatever either among the Athenians, the
Vikings, the Normans, Carthaginians, or Venetians.
These catastrophes belonged exclusively to modern
naval history, which had it s triumphs, but was
darkened by many more shadows than those features
which beautified it. The professor, having made this
explanation, stated that he had arranged for the im-
mediate hour a little lecture on "Patience," and then
proceeded to read from some of his former works, and
concluded by saying that next Saturday he would
have the happiness of saying something about glaciers
and mountains, and so forth, and would afterwards
resume his series of lectures by that on the "Pleasures
of Sense."