which was a plea for the superiority of modern naturalistic landscape-painting. Frequent visits to Italy subsequently revealed to him the greatness of the early Italian masters. And when, in 1851, the new group of artists which called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, were savagely attacked by the critics, he stood forth to defend them in several letters to the "Times' and in a pamphlet on Pre-Raphaelitism (1851). From 1853 he took up public lecturing, and, in 1869, accepted the Slade Professorship of Fine Arts at Oxford, which he held for 13 years. After the death of his parents, in whose house at Denmark Hill, London, he had mainly resided up till then, he bought (1871) the little estate of Brantwood on Coniston Lake, Lancashire, where he lived for the rest of his days. The last 30 years of his life were much darkened by ill-health, which at last developed into mental disease. He died at Brantwood in his eightyfirst year, and was buried in the villagechurchyard of Coniston.

Ruskin was a voluminous writer on painting, architecture, social reform, ethics, education, political economy, and other subjects. His most lasting performance will probably be his art-criticism, which he laid down in the three monumental works of Modern Painters (5 vols. 1843-60), The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), The Stones of Venice (1851-53), and in his lectures as Slade Professor, printed under such titles as Lectures on Art (1870), Aratra Pentelici (1872), The Eagle's Nest (1872), Ariadne Florentina (1873), and The Art of England (1883). The Seven Lamps of Architecture was to teach how the 'lamps', i. e. ideas, of Sacrifice, Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory, and Obedi

ence are to be represented in stone; and the Stones of Venice was to show, by the example of Venetian architecture, how all beauty of constructive art was dependent on the sound social condition of a nation.

In his later years (after 1860), Ruskin turned more and more to economic and social questions, in which, for want of systematic thinking, he was less successful, though he acquired a deep moral influence on the rising generation. Saturated with the thought of Carlyle, he began his career as social reformer with a grim assault on the current science of political economy in a series of magazine essays which he collected under the titles of Unto this Last (1862) and Munera Pulveris (1872). Then he applied himself to practical socialism in two series of letters addressed to working men, entitled Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne (1867) and Fors Clavigera (1871-84), which, however, were full of fanciful, impracticable, and even Quixotic ideas, as he realized himself when he tried to put some of his Utopias into practice. Educational and ethical questions, such as the use of good books, the true sphere of women, the duty of work, and the training of the lower classes, form the main part of the three lectures printed under the title of Sesame and Lilies (1865), which has become his most popular volume, and of those called The Crown of Wild Olive (1866). His last important work was his charming, frank, but somewhat garrulous autobiography, entitled Præterita (1885-89). Most of his works, especially the earlier ones, are written in a highly poetical and richly decorated prose, and show that exquisite beauty of style which in the end may prove Ruskin's most permanent claim to fame.

Among the hours of his life to which the writer looks back with peculiar gratitude, as having been marked by more than ordinary ful5 ness of joy or clearness of teaching, is one passed, now some years ago, near time of sunset, among the broken masses of pine forest which skirt the course of the Ain, above the village 10 of Champagnole, in the Jura. It is a spot which has all the solemnity,

with none of the savageness, of the Alps; where there is a sense of a great power beginning to be manifested in the earth, and of a deep 15 and majestic concord in the rise of the long low lines of piny hills; the first utterance of those mighty mountain symphonies, soon to be more loudly lifted and wildly broken along 20 the battlements of the Alps. But their strength is as yet restrained;

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and the far reaching ridges of pastoral mountain succeed each other, like 25 the long and sighing swell which moves over quiet waters from some far off stormy sea. And there is a deep tenderness pervading that vast monotony. The destructive forces 80 and the stern expression of the central ranges are alike withdrawn. No frost-ploughed, dust-encumbered paths of ancient glacier fret the soft Jura pastures; no splintered heaps of ruin break the fair ranks of her forest; no pale, defiled, or furious rivers rend their rude and changeful ways among her rocks. Patiently, eddy by eddy, the clear green streams 40 wind along their well-known beds; and under the dark quietness of the undisturbed pines, there spring up, year by year, such company of joyful flowers as I know not the like 45 of among all the blessings of the earth. It was spring time, too; and all were coming forth in clusters crowded for very love; there was room enough for all, but they crushed 50 their leaves into all manner of strange shapes only to be nearer each other. There was the wood anemone, star after star, closing every now and then into nebula; and there was 6 the oxalis, troop by troop, like virginal processions of the Mois de Marie, the dark vertical clefts in the limestone choked up with them as with heavy snow, and touched 60 with ivy on the edges - ivy as light and lovely as the vine; and, ever and anon, a blue gush of violets, and cowslip bells in sunny places; and in the more open ground, the 65 vetch, and comfrey, and mezereon, and the small sapphire buds of the Polygala Alpina, and the wild strawberry, just a blossom or two, all showered amidst the golden softness 70 of deep, warm, amber-coloured moss. I came out presently on the edge

of the ravine: the solemn murmur of its waters rose suddenly from beneath, mixed with the singing of the thrushes among the pine boughs; 75 and, on the opposite side of the valley, walled all along as it was by grey cliffs of limestone, there was a hawk sailing slowly off their brow, touching them nearly with his wings, 80 and with the shadows of the pines flickering upon his plumage from above; but with the fall of a hundred fathoms under his breast, and the curling pools of the green river glid- 85 ing and glittering dizzily beneath him, their foam globes moving with him as he flew. It would be difficult to conceive a scene less dependent upon any other interest than that of its 90 own secluded and serious beauty; but the writer well remembers the sudden blankness and chill which were cast upon it when he endeavoured, in order more strictly to arrive at the 25 sources of its impressiveness, to imagine it, for a moment, a scene in some aboriginal forest of the New Continent. The flowers in an instant lost their light, the river its 100 music; the hills became oppressively desolate; a heaviness in the boughs of the darkened forest showed how much of their former power had been dependent upon a life which was 105 not theirs, how much of the glory of the imperishable, or continually renewed, creation is reflected from things more precious in their memories than it, in its renewing. Those 110 ever springing flowers and ever flowing streams had been dyed by the deep colours of human endurance, valour, and virtue; and the crests of the sable hills that rose against 115 the evening sky received a deeper worship, because their far shadows fell eastward over the iron wall of Joux, and the four-square keep of Granson.

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It is as the centralisation and protectress of this sacred influence, that Architecture is to be regarded by us with the most serious thought. 125 We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her. How cold is all history, how lifeless all imagery, compared to that which the living 130 nation writes, and the uncorrupted marble bears! how many pages of doubtful record might we not often spare, for a few stones left one upon another! The ambition of the old 185 Babel builders was well directed for this world: there are but two strong conquerors of the forgetfulness of men, Poetry and Architecture; and the latter in some sort includes the 140 former, and is mightier in its reality: it is well to have, not only what men have thought and felt, but what their hands have handled, and their strength wrought, and their eyes 145 beheld, all the days of their life. The age of Homer is surrounded with darkness, his very personality with doubt. Not so that of Pericles; and the day is coming when we shall 150 confess, that we have learned more of Greece out of the crumbled fragments of her sculpture than even from her sweet singers or soldier historians. And if indeed there be 155 any profit in our knowledge of the past, or any joy in the thought of being remembered hereafter, which can give strength to present exertion, or patience to present endurance, 160 there are two duties respecting national architecture whose importance it is impossible to overrate: the first, to render the architecture of the day historical; and the second, to pre165 serve, as the most precious of inheritances, that of past ages.

It is in the first of these two directions that Memory may truly be said to be the Sixth Lamp of Archi

tecture; for it is in becoming me- 170 morial or monumental that a true perfection is attained by civil and domestic buildings; and this partly as they are, with such a view, built in a more stable manner, and partly 175 as their decorations are consequently animated by a metaphorical or historical meaning.

As regards domestic buildings, there must always be a certain limitation 180 to views of this kind in the power, as well as in the hearts, of men; still I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation 185 only. There is a sanctity in a good man's house which cannot be renewed in every tenement that rises on its ruins: and I believe that good men would generally feel this; and that 190 having spent their lives happily and honourably, they would be grieved, at the close of them, to think that the place of their earthly abode, which had seen, and seemed almost 195 to sympathise in, all their honour, their gladness, or their suffering, that this, with all the record it bare of them, and of all material things that they had loved and ruled over, 200 and set the stamp of themselves upon was to be swept away, as soon as there was room made for them in the grave; that no respect was to be shown to it, no affection 205 felt for it, no good to be drawn from it by their children; that though there was a monument in the church, there was no warm monument in the hearth and house to them; that 210 all that they ever treasured was despised, and the places that had sheltered and comforted them were dragged down to the dust. I say that a good man would fear this; and that, 215 far more, a good son, a noble descendant, would fear doing it to his father's house. I say that if men

lived like men indeed, their houses 220 would be temples temples which we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural 225 affection, a strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our father's honour, or that our 230 own lives are not such as would

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make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little revolution of his own life only. 235 And I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up, in mildewed forwardness, out of the kneaded fields about our capital upon those thin, tottering, foun240 dationless shells of splintered wood and imitated stone upon those gloomy rows of formalised minuteness, alike without difference and without fellowship, as solitary as similar 245 not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness 250 must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground; that those comfortless and unhonoured dwellings are the signs of a great and spreading spirit of 255 popular discontent; that they mark the time when every man's aim is to be in some more elevated sphere than his natural one, and every man's past life is his habitual scorn; when 260 men build in the hope of leaving the places they have built, and live in the hope of forgetting the years that they have lived; when the comfort, the peace, the religion of home 265 have ceased to be felt; and the crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only

from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy 270 choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

This is no slight, no consequence- 275 less evil; it is ominous, infectious, and fecund of other fault and misfortune. When men do not love their hearths, nor reverence their thresholds, it is a sign that they have 280 dishonoured both, and that they have never acknowledged the true universality of that Christian worship which was indeed to supersede the idolatry, but not the piety, of the pagan. Our 285 God is a household God, as well as a heavenly one; He has an altar in every man's dwelling; let men look to it when they rend it lightly and pour out its ashes. It is not a 290 question of mere ocular delight, it is no question of intellectual pride, or of cultivated and critical fancy, how, and with what aspect of durability and of completeness, the domestic 296 buildings of a nation shall be raised. It is one of those moral duties, not with more impunity to be neglected because the perception of them depends on a finely toned and balanced con- 300 scientiousness, to build our dwellings with care, and patience, and fondness, and diligent completion, and with a view to their duration at least for such a period as, in the 305 ordinary course of national revolutions, might be supposed likely to extend to the entire alteration of the direction of local interests. This at the least; but it would be better if, 310 in every possible instance, men built their own houses on a scale commensurate rather with their condition at the commencement, than their attainments at the termination, of 315 their worldly career; and built them

I look to this spirit of honourable, proud, peaceful self-possession, this abiding wisdom of contented life, as probably one of the chief sources of 335 great intellectual power in all ages, and beyond dispute as the very primal source of the great architecture of old Italy and France. To this day, the interest of their fairest cities 340 depends, not on the isolated richness

of palaces, but on the cherished and exquisite decoration of even the smallest tenements of their proud periods. The most elaborate piece of archi845 tecture in Venice is a small house at the head of the Grand Canal, consisting of a ground floor with two stories above, three windows in the first, and two in the second. 850 Many of the most exquisite buildings are on the narrower canals, and of no larger dimensions. One of the most interesting pieces of fifteenth century architecture in North Italy 355 is a small house in a back street, behind the market-place of Vicenza; it bears date 1481, and the motto, Il n'est. sans épine; it has also only a ground floor and 360 two stories, with three windows in each, separated by rich flower-work, and with balconies, supported, the central one by an eagle with open wings, the lateral ones by winged 365 griffins standing on cornucopiæ. The

rose

idea that a house must be large in order to be well built, is altogether of modern growth, and is parallel with the idea, that no picture can be historical, except of a size admit- 370 ting figures larger than life.

I would have, then, our ordinary dwelling-houses built to last, and built to be lovely; as rich and full of pleasantness as may be, within and 375 without; with what degree of likeness to each other in style and manner, I will say presently, under another head; but, at all events, with such differences as might suit and 380 express each man's character and occupation, and partly his history. This right over the house, I conceive, belongs to its first builder, and is to be respected by his children; and 385 it would be well that blank stones should be left in places, to be inscribed with a summary of his life and of its experience, raising thus the habitation into a kind of monu- 390 ment, and developing, into more systematic instructiveness, that good custom which was of old universal, and which still remains among some of the Swiss and Germans, of ac- 395 knowledging the grace of God's permission to build and possess a quiet resting-place, in such sweet words as may well close our speaking of these things. I have taken them from the 400 front of a cottage lately built among the green pastures which descend from the village of Grindelwald to the lower glacier:

Mit herzlichem Vertrauen

Hat Johannes Mooter und Maria Rubi
Dieses Haus bauen lassen.

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