MY DEAR SIR: I have your obliging letter, but am compelled by increase of work to cease lecturing except at Oxford--and practically there also--for, indeed, I find the desire of audiences to be _audiences only_ becoming an entirely pestilent character of the age. Everybody wants to _hear_--nobody to read--nobody to think; to be excited for an hour--and, if possible, amused; to get the knowledge it has cost a man half his life to gather, first sweetened up to make it palatable, and then kneaded into the smallest possible pills--and to swallow it homœopathically and be wise--this is the passionate desire and hope of the multitude of the day. It is not to be done. A living comment quietly given to a class on a book they are earnestly reading--this kind of lecture is eternally necessary and wholesome; your modern fire-working, smooth-downy-curry-and-strawberry-ice-and-milk-punch-altogether lecture is an entirely pestilent and abominable vanity; and the miserable death of poor Dickens, when he might have been writing blessed books till he was eighty, but for the pestiferous demand of the mob, is a very solemn warning to us all, if we would take it.[115] God willing, I will go on writing, and as well as I can. There are three volumes published of my Oxford lectures,[116] in which every sentence is set down as carefully as may be. If people want to learn from me, let them read them or my monthly letter _Fors Clavigera_. If they don't care for these, I don't care to talk to them. Truly yours, J. RUSKIN. FOOTNOTES: [114] This letter was written to Mr. Chapman, of the Glasgow Athenæum Lecture Committee, in reply to a request that Mr. Ruskin would lecture at their meetings during the winter. Writing from Oxford four years later, in answer to a similar request, Mr. Ruskin wrote as follows: "Nothing can advance art in any district of this accursed machine-and-devil driven England until she changes her mind in many things, and my time for talking is past.--Ever faithfully yours, J. Ruskin. I lecture here, but only on the art of the past." (Extract given in the _Times_, Feb. 12, 1878.) [115] The evil result on Dickens' health of his last series of readings at St. James's Hall, in the early part of 1870, scarcely four months before his death, is thus noted by Mr. Forster: "Little remains to be told that has not in it almost unmixed sorrow and pain. Hardly a day passed, while the readings went on or after they closed, unvisited by some effect or other of the disastrous excitement consequent on them."--"Life of Charles Dickens," vol. iii. p. 493. [116] "Aratra Pentalici." "The Eagle's Nest"; and either "Val d'Arno" (Orpington, 1874) or "Lectures on Art" (Clarendon Press, 1870). [Date and place of publication unknown.] _THE CRADLE OF ART!_[117] _18th Feb._ 1876.