INTRODUCTION TO THIS VOLUME

Summary

In this volume are collected various Lectures, Reviews, Pamphlets, Letters, and other Papers, written or published between the years 1844 and 1854—that is, during the period in Ruskin's literary life, of which the principal works were The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice. The volume may be said from this point of view to be a collection of occasional works undertaken by the way and on what he afterwards called “the old road.” It contains, indeed, a great part of the first volume of the collection of miscellanies, to which Ruskin gave that title on its publication in 1885. But to these miscellanies there is here added a larger production of the same period, the Lectures on Architecture and Painting. The volume is divided into four parts. The first contains these Lectures (delivered 1853, published 1854), to which precedence is given on account of their more considerable scale, and for another reason presently to be stated. The second Part contains seven pieces (or collection of pieces) on subjects connected with Art; and to these is added in an appendix some supplementary and illustrative matter. The third Part contains Ruskin's principal excursus in the field of theological and ecclesiastical controversy—the Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds—to which again is added, in an appendix, additional and related matter which hitherto has either not been printed or printed only for private circulation.