Produced by Juliet Sutherland, William Flis, and Distributed Proofreaders Europe, http://dp.rastko.net THE PLEASURES OF ENGLAND. LECTURES GIVEN IN OXFORD. BY JOHN RUSKIN, D.C.L., LL.D., HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, AND HONORARY FELLOW OF CORPUS-CHRISTI COLLEGE. DURING HIS _SECOND TENURE OF THE SLADE PROFESSORSHIP._ NEW YORK: JOHN WILEY AND SONS. 1888. * * * * * CONTENTS LECTURE I. THE PLEASURES OF LEARNING. _Bertha to Osburga_ 5 LECTURE II. THE PLEASURES OF FAITH. _Alfred to the Confessor_ 31 LECTURE III. THE PLEASURES OF DEED. _Alfred to Cœur de Lion_ 61 LECTURE IV. THE PLEASURES OF FANCY. _Cœur de Lion to Elizabeth_ 91 * * * * * LECTURE I. THE PLEASURES OF LEARNING. _BERTHA TO OSBURGA._ In the short review of the present state of English Art, given you last year, I left necessarily many points untouched, and others unexplained. The seventh lecture, which I did not think it necessary to read aloud, furnished you with some of the corrective statements of which, whether spoken or not, it was extremely desirable that you should estimate the balancing weight. These I propose in the present course farther to illustrate, and to arrive with you at, I hope, a just--you would not wish it to be a flattering--estimate of the conditions of our English artistic life, past and present, in order that with due allowance for them we may determine, with some security, what those of us who have faculty ought to do, and those who have sensibility, to admire. 2. In thus rightly doing and feeling, you will find summed a wider duty, and granted a greater power, than the moral philosophy at this moment current with you has ever conceived; and a prospect opened to you besides, of such a Future for England as you may both hopefully and proudly labour for with your hands, and those of you who are spared to the ordinary term of human life, even see with your eyes, when all this tumult of vain avarice and idle pleasure, into which you have been plunged at birth, shall have passed into its appointed perdition. 3. I wish that you would read for introduction to the lectures I have this year arranged for you, that on the Future of England, which I gave to the cadets at Woolwich in the first year of my Professorship here, 1869; and which is now placed as the main conclusion of the "Crown of Wild Olive": and with it, very attentively, the close of my inaugural lecture given here; for the matter, no less than the tenor of which, I was reproved by all my friends, as irrelevant and ill-judged;--which, nevertheless, is of all the pieces of teaching I have ever given from this chair, the most pregnant and essential to whatever studies, whether of Art or Science, you may pursue, in this place or elsewhere, during your lives.