He never pretended that Jupiter was on
his side. He thanked his soldiers after a victory, but he did not
order Te Deums to be sung for it; and in the absence of these
conventionalisms he perhaps showed more real reverence than he could
have displayed by the freest use of the formulas of pietism.

He fought his battles to establish some tolerable degree of justice in
the government of this world; and he succeeded, tho he was murdered
for doing it.

Strange and startling resemblance between the fate of the founder of
the kingdom of this world and of the Founder of the kingdom not of
this world for which the first was a preparation. Each was denounced
for making himself a king. Each was maligned as the friend of
publicans and sinners; each was betrayed by those whom he had loved
and cared for; each was put to death; and Caesar also was believed to
have risen again and ascended into heaven and become a divine being.

JOHN RUSKIN

Born in 1819, died in 1900; his father a wealthy
wine-merchant in London; educated at Oxford; published the
first volume of "Modern Painters" in 1843; made professor at
Cambridge in 1858; professor at Oxford in 1869; retired to
his estate on Coniston Lake in 1855; published "Lamps of
Architecture" in 1849, "Stones of Venice" in 1851-53,
followed by a large number of other works, including his
"Autobiography" in 1887-88.

I

OF THE HISTORY AND SOVEREIGNTY OF VENICE[37]

Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three
thrones, of mark beyond all other, have been set upon its sands; the
thrones of Tyre, Venice and England. Of the first of these great
powers only the memory remains; of the second, the ruin; the third,
which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led
through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction.

[Footnote 37: From Chapter I of "The Stones of Venice."]

The exaltation, the sin, and the punishment of Tyre have been recorded
for us, in perhaps the most touching words ever uttered by the
prophets of Israel against the cities of the stranger. But we read
them as a lovely song; and close our ears to the sternness of their
warning; for the very depth of the fall of Tyre has blinded us to its
reality, and we forget, as we watch the bleaching of the rocks
between the sunshine and the sea, that they were once "as in Eden, the
garden of God."

Her successor, like her in perfection