ated
with the worst architecture I ever saw." The architects of his own time
regarded Ruskin's opinions as dictated by wild caprice, and almost
evincing an unbalanced mind. Probably the core of all this
architectural work is to be found in his chapter "On the Nature of
Gothic," in the main reproduced in this volume. And we find here again
a point of fundamental significance--that his artistic analysis led him
inevitably on to social inquiries. He proved to himself that the main
virtue of Gothic lay in the unrestricted play of the individual
imagination; that the best results were produced when every artist was
a workman and every workman an artist. Twenty years after the
publication of this book, he wrote in a private letter that his main
purpose "was to show the dependence of (architectural) beauty on the
happiness and fancy of the workman, and to show also that no architect
could claim the title to authority of _Magister_ unless he himself
wrought at the head of his men, captain of manual skill, as the best
knight is captain of armies." He himself called the chapter "precisely
and accurately the most important in the whole book." Mr. Frederic
Harrison says that in it is "the creed, if it be not the origin, of a
new industrial school of thought."

THE THRONE

VOLUME II, CHAPTER I

In the olden days of travelling, now to return no more, in which
distance could not be vanquished without toil, but in which that toil
was rewarded, partly by the power of deliberate survey of the countries
through which the journey lay, and partly by the happiness of the
evening hours, when from the top of the last hill he had surmounted,
the traveller beheld the quiet village where he was to rest, scattered
among the meadows beside its valley stream; or, from the long hoped for
turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw, for the first time,
the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset--hours of
peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in
the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an
equivalent,--in those days, I say, when there was something more to be
anticipated and remembered in the first aspect of each successive
halting-place, than a new arrangement of glass roofing and iron girder,
there were few moments of which the recollection was more fondly
cherished by the traveller, than that which, as I endeavoured to
describe in the close of the last chapter, brought