Osborne Gordon had recommended him to read Hooker, and he caught the tone and style of the "Ecclesiastical Polity" only too readily, so that much of his work of that winter, the more philosophical part of vol.ii., was damaged by inversions, and Elizabethan quaintness as of ruff and train, long epexegetical sentences, and far-sought pomposity of diction.

It was only when he had waded through the chaos which he set himself to survey, that he could lay aside his borrowed stilts, and stand on his own feet in the Tintoret descriptions--rather stiff, yet, from foregone efforts.
This volume, like the first, was completed in the winter, in one long spell of hard work, broken only by a visit to Oxford in January as the guest of Dr.Greswell, Head of Worcester, at a conference for the promotion of art.

Smith and Elder accepted the book on Mr.J.J.

Ruskin's terms (so his wife wrote), for they had already reported it as called for by the public.

The first volume was going into a third edition.
When his book came out he was away again in Italy, trying to show his father all that he had seen in the Campo Santo and Giotto's Tower, and to explain "why it more than startled him." The good man hardly felt the force of it all at once.