Philanthropic instincts, and a growing sense of the necessity for social reform, had led Ruskin for some years past towards a group of liberal thinkers with whom he had little otherwise in common. At Venice, in 1852, he had written several articles on education, taxation, and so forth, with which he intended to plunge into active politics. His father, like a cautious man of business who knew his son's powers and thought he knew their limitations, was strongly opposed to this attempt, and used every argument against it. He appealed to his son's sensitiveness, and assured him that he would be "flayed" unless he wrapped himself in the hide of a rhinoceros. He assured him that, without being on the spot to follow the discussions of politicians, it was useless to offer them any opinions whatsoever. And he ended by declaring that it would be the ruin of his business and of his peace of mind if the name of Ruskin were mixed up with Radical electioneering: not that he was unwilling to suffer martyrdom for a cause in which he believed, but he did not believe in the movements afoot--neither the Tailors' Cooperative Society, in which their friend F.J. Furnivall was interested, nor in any outcome of Chartism or Chartist principles. And so for a time the matter dropped. In 1854, the Rev. F.D. Maurice founded the Working Men's College. Mr. Furnivall sent the circulars to John Ruskin; who thereupon wrote to Maurice, and offered his services. At the opening lecture on October 31, 1854, at St. Martin's Hall, Long Acre, Furnivall distributed to all comers a reprint of the chapter "On the Nature of Gothic," which we have already noticed as a statement of the conclusions drawn from the study of art respecting the conditions under which the life of the workman should be regulated. Ruskin thus appeared as contributing, so to say, the manifesto of the movement. He took charge from the commencement of the drawing-classes--first at 31 Red Lion Square, and afterwards at Great Ormond Street; also super-intending classes taught by Messrs. Jeffery and E. Cooke at the Working Women's (afterwards the Working Men and Women's) College, Queen Square. In this labour he had two allies; one a friend of Maurice's, Lowes Dickinson, the well-known artist, whose portrait of Maurice was mentioned with honour in the "Notes on the Academy"; his portrait of Kingsley hangs in the hall of the novelist-professor's college at Cambridge. The other helper was new friend. To people who know him only as the elegant theorist of art, sentimental and egotistic, as they will have it, there must be something strange, almost irreconcilable, in his devotion, week after week and year after year, to these night-classes. Still more must it astonish them to find the mystic author of the "Blessed Damozel," the passionate painter of the "Venus Verticordia," working by Ruskin's side in this rough navvy-labour of philanthropy.