With him Ruskin spent July and August of 1860 at Chamouni.

He did but little drawing, and in the few sketches that remain of that summer there is evidence that his mind was far away from its old love of mountains and of streamlets.

His lonely walks in the pinewoods of the Arveron were given to meditation on a great problem which had been set, as it seemed, for him to solve, ever since he had written that chapter on "The Nature of Gothic." Now at last, in the solitude of the Alps, he could grapple with the questions he had raised; and the outcome of the struggle was "Unto this Last." The year before, from Thun and Bonneville and Lausanne (August and September, 1859) he had written letters to E.S.Dallas, suggested by the strikes in the London building trade.

In these he appears to have sketched the outline of a new conception of social science, which he was now elaborating with more attempt at system and brevity than he had been accustomed to use.
These new papers, painfully thought out and carefully set down in his room at the Hotel de l'Union, he used--as long before he read his daily chapter to the breakfast party at Herne Hill--to read to Stillman: and he sent them to the _Cornhill Magazine_, started the year before by Smith and Elder.

Ruskin had already contributed to it a paper on "Sir Joshua and Holbein," a stray chapter from Vol.