the feats of modern science,
and exclaims somewhere:--

"The scientific men are as busy as ants examining the sun and the
moon and the seven stars; and can tell me all about them, I
believe, by this time, and how they move, and what they are made
of. And I do not care, for my part, two copper spangles how they
move or of what they are made. I can't move them any other way than
they go, nor make them of anything else better than they are made."

It is over forty years ago that Ruskin startled the literary and
artistic world with that marvellous book entitled "Modern Painters;
Their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to All the Ancient
Masters." The title contained the argument of the book, and it was a
monumental heresy to utter at that time. Not that there was the least
doubt as to its truth, but no voice had then been raised to proclaim it.
The English people at that time were blind worshippers of Claude and
one or two other old masters; and here was a daring youth--reminding one
of David with his sling--going forth to do battle against all the
received art opinions of his day, and boldly proclaiming Turner a better
painter than Claude, Salvator Rosa, Gaspar Poussin, and the various
Van-Somethings who had until that time held undisputed sway in
conventional art circles. The young Oxford graduate was greeted with a
perfect tempest of ridicule and denunciation. Every critic in the land
hurled his lance at him, and every artist looked upon him with sovereign
contempt. The young Oxford man, however, valiantly held his ground. He
possessed genius, profound conviction, and a magnificent self-conceit;
and he hurled back defiance to the whole art-clan, and rode forward.
Criticism beat upon the book in vain. Everybody read it, and everybody
talked about it, and it conquered criticism at last. No such sensation
in the art line has been made in Ruskin's day. His teachings in the
course of a few years well-nigh revolutionized art opinion in England.
The sum and substance of it was Nature against conventionality. People
must look at Nature with their own eyes and judge art by the help of
Nature. This seems simple enough to-day, but it was a new doctrine in
Ruskin's youth.

Ruskin has always been an extremest in everything, and he went so far as
to denounce Raphael's "Charge to Peter" on the grounds that the Apostles
are not dressed as men of that time and place would have been when going
o