Housman on Ruskin - a sort of malicious deliberation

A. E. Housman, from an 1877 letter, on John Ruskin as a teacher at Oxford:

This afternoon Ruskin gave us a great outburst against modern times. He had got a picture of Turner's, framed and glassed, representing Leicester and the Abbey in the distance at sunset, over a river. He read the account of Wolsey's death out of Henry VIII. Then he pointed to the picture as representing Leicester when Turner had drawn it.

Then he said, "You, if you like, may go to Leicester to see what it is like now. I never shall. But I can make a pretty good guess." Then he caught up a paintbrush. "These stepping-stones of course have been done away with, and are replaced by a be-au-ti-ful iron bridge." Then he dashed in the iron bridge on the glass of the picture. "The colour of the stream is supplied on one side by the indigo factory." Forthwith one side of the stream became indigo. "On the other side by the soap factory." Soap dashed in. "They mix in the middle — like curds," he said, working them together with a sort of malicious deliberation. "This field, over which you see the sun setting behind the abbey, is not occupied in a proper manner." Then there went a flame of scarlet across the picture, which developed itself into windows and roofs and red brick, and rushed up into a chimney. "The atmosphere is supplied — thus!"

A puff and cloud of smoke all over Turner's sky: and then the brush thrown down, and Ruskin confronting modern civilisation amidst a tempest of applause, which he always elicits now, as he has this term become immensely popular, his lectures being crowded, whereas of old he used to prophesy to empty benches.

I added the paragraphing. I could only find a print based on the Leicester Abbey watercolor. No other comment necessary.