The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-12-07
A LECTURE BY RUsKIN,

The Famous People Who Heard It.
 For years Mrs. O'Connor Morris Bishops house in Prince of Wales ter race was rendezvous of authors and journalists, churchmen and politicians, as we'll as of French men and women Of distinction. One habitue was Mrs. Augustus Craven a member of the de- lightful De la Ferronnays family, whom one knows so intimately through her "Recit dune Soeu"," and after Mrs. Craven's death her Life" was written by Mrs. Bishop. In that drawing room in Prince of Wales terrace great things were done. There one heard Coventry Patmore read aloud his "Odes," and MT. Ruskin lecture to an audience of guests on the occasion of one of his last appearances in general society.
 That was in June of the year 1883. The professor, as, MT. Ruskin was then commonly called-and the name suited him who was, and was proud to be, teacher-had had his first illness, and his coming into the world again was somehthing in the nature of resurrec- ton. Such, at least, it seemed to some and there was about the whole man a spiritual presence belonging only to thcse who in one way or other, are dead to this world During his ill., ness he had grown his brown beard, and his thick brown hair was brushed close to his head, which is abnormally flat at the top: so that at a little dis tance he looked like the picture of a hooded Capuchin friar. Nor would that description have been one he would wish to repudiate. For the pro- lessor had been dreaming many dreams during his illness and before it, and once he had dreamed that he was friar of St. Francis. After that in actual waking life, he was in Rome, and each day, on the steps of the Pin- cio, within sight of the window which slowly grew "a glmmering square" to the dying eyes of Keats he used to give aims to an old beggar man. The beggar man once kissed his hand
 whereupon the benefactor-all English man and a professor though he was stopped down. on an impulse, and kiss ed the beggar on the cheek On the next day the beggar came to his lodg- ing with tears of gratitude and with an offering-a shred of the brown robe which had once been worn by St. Francis. Then the professor remem- bered his old dream, that he, too, was a Franciscan, and he set off to Assist and to the convent of St. Francis, where he had his reward in a sight of the frescoes of Giotto and much more besides.
 But now he was back, for the mo- ment, in a London drawing room, face to face with an audience of friends. It is only fifteen years ago, yet what changes, what endings, what tragedies, come to mind as one recalls that in teresting group! MT. Lowell was there, man of the world, man of two l continents, and hence doubly mundane, | yet also man of letters; alas! mundane now no more Matthew Arnold was l there, mundane, too, by the measure ! of the man he had come to hear; not of this world any more. Lord Leigh | ton came late, and came late purpose | ly, nervous lest his sensitiveness should be shattered by some sally of that lec- | turer of whom, as a critic, it had once been said: Damn him, why doesn't | he back his friends?" That sensitive
 presence is ous no more; nor is that of | Sir Edward Burne-Jones, who stunned
 himself that afternoon in Ruskins fa- vor. Miss Jean 1ngelow, true wo-