In August, the young people were seen safely off to Normandy, where they went by easy stages from town to town, studying the remains of Gothic building.

In October they returned and settled in a house of their own, at 31, Park Street, where during the winter he wrote "The Seven Lamps of Architecture," and, as a bit of by-work, a notice of Samuel Prout for the _Art Journal._ This was Ruskin's first illustrated volume.

The plates were engraved by himself in soft-ground etching, such as Prout had used, from drawings he had made in 1846 and 1848.

Some are scrappy combinations of various detail, but others, such as the Byzantine capital, the window in Giotto's Campanile, the arches from St.Lo in Normandy, from St.Michele at Lucca, and from the Ca' Foscari at Venice, are effective studies of the actual look of old buildings, seen as they are shown us in Nature, with her light and the shade added to all the facts of form, and her own last touches in the way of weather-softening, and settling-faults, and tufted, nestling plants.
Revisiting the Hotel de la Cloche at Dijon in later years, Ruskin showed me the room where he had "bitten" the last plate in his wash-hand basin, as a careless makeshift for the regular etcher's bath.

He was not dissatisfied with his work himself; the public of the day wanted something more finished.