"The mode in which you direct your charity puts me in mind of a matter that has lain long on my mind, though I never have had the time or face to talk to you of it. In somebody's drawing-room, ages ago, you were speaking accidentally of M. de Marvy.[8] I expressed my great obligation to him; on which you said that I could prove my gratitude, if I chose, to his widow,--which choice I then not accepting, have ever since remembered the circumstance as one peculiarly likely to add, so far as it went, to the general impression on your mind of the hollowness of people's sayings and hardness of their hearts. The fact is, I give what I give almost in an opposite way to yours. I think there are many people who will relieve hopeless distress for one who will help at a hopeful pinch; and when I have the choice I nearly always give where I think the money will be fruitful rather than merely helpful. I would lecture for a school when I would _not_ for a distressed author; and would have helped De Marvy to perfect his invention, but not--unless I had no other object--his widow after he was gone. In a word, I like to prop the falling more than to feed the fallen." [Footnote 8: Louis Marvy, an engraver, and political refugee after the French Revolution of 1848. He produced the plates, and Thackeray the text, of "Landscape Painters of England, in a series of steel engravings, with short Notices."] The winter passed without any great undertaking. G.F. Watts proposed to add Ruskin's portrait to his gallery of celebrities; but he was in no mood to sit. Rossetti did, however, sketch him this year. In March he presented eighty-three Turner drawings to Oxford, and twenty-five to Cambridge. The address of thanks with the great seal of Oxford University is dated March 23rd, 1861; the Catalogue of the Cambridge collection is dated May 28th. On April 2nd he addressed the St. George's Mission Working Men's Institute, and shortly afterwards, though at this time in a much enfeebled state of health, gave a lecture before "a most brilliant audience," as the _London Review_ reported, at the Royal Institution (April 19th, 1861). Carlyle wrote to his brother John: "Friday last I was persuaded--in fact had inwardly compelled myself as it were--to a lecture of Ruskin's at the Institution, Albemarle Street, Lecture on Tree Leaves as physiological, pictorial, moral, symbolical objects. A crammed house, but tolerable even to me in the gallery. The lecture was thought to 'break down,' and indeed it quite did '_as a lecture_'; but only did from _embarras de richesses_--a rare case. Ruskin did blow asunder as by gunpowder explosions his leaf notions, which were manifold, curious, genial; and in fact, I do not recollect to have heard in that place any neatest thing I liked so well as this chaotic one."