He was more seriously engaged in other pursuits, of more immediate importance.

Three days after his lecture he was being examined before the Royal Academy Commission, and after a short summer visit to various friends in the north of England, he set out again for the Alps, partly to study the geology of Chamouni and North Switzerland, partly to continue his drawings of Swiss towns at Baden and Lauffenburg, with his pupil John Bunney.

But even there the burden of his real mission could not be shaken off, and though again seeking health and a quiet mind, he could not quite keep silence, but wrote letters to English newspapers on the depreciation of gold (repeating his theory of currency), and on the wrongs of Poland and Italy; and he put together more papers, not then published, in continuation of his "Munera Pulveris." Since about 1850, Carlyle had been gradually becoming more and more friendly with John Ruskin; and now that this social and economical work had been taken up, he began to have a real esteem for him, though always with a patronizing tone, which the younger man's open and confessed discipleship accepted and encouraged.

This letter especially shows both men in an unaccustomed light: Ruskin, hating tobacco, sends his "master" cigars; Carlyle, hating cant, replies rather in the tone of the temperance advocate, taking a little wine for his stomach's sake: "CHELSEA, 22 _Feby_, 1865 "DEAR RUSKIN, "You have sent me a munificent Box of Cigars; for wh'h what can I say in ans'r?
It makes me both sad and glad.

_Ay de mi._ "We are such stuff, Gone with a puff--Then think, and smoke Tobacco!' "The Wife also has had her Flowers; and a letter wh'h has charmed the female mind.