n of which
is yet undecided), but it illustrates one of his doctrines about the
simplicity with which works of irrigation could be carried out among the
hills of Italy.

And so you go in to tea and chess, for he loves a good game of chess
with all his heart. He loves many things, you have found. He is
different from other men you know, by the breadth and vividness of his
sympathies, by power of living as few other men can live, in Admiration,
Hope and Love.

CHAPTER VII

"FORS" RESUMED (1880-1881)

Retirement at Brantwood was only partial. Ruskin's habits of life made
it impossible for him to be idle, much as he acknowledged the need of
thorough rest. He could not be wholly ignorant of the world outside
Coniston; though sometimes for weeks together he tried to ignore it, and
refused to read a newspaper. The time when General Gordon went out to
Khartoum was one of these periods of abstraction, devoted to mediaeval
study. Somebody talked one morning at breakfast about the Soudan. "And
who _is_ the Soudan?" he earnestly inquired, connecting the name, as it
seemed, with the Soldan of Babylon, in crusading romance.

"Don't you know," he wrote to a friend (January 8th, 1880):

"That I am entirely with you in this Irish misery, and have been
these thirty years?--only one can't speak plain without distinctly
becoming a leader of Revolution? I know that Revolution _must come_
in all the world--but I can't act with Dan ton or Robespierre, nor
with the modern French Republican or Italian one. I _could_ with
you and your Irish, but you are only at the beginning of the end. I
have spoken,--and plainly too,--for all who have ears, and hear."

The author of "Fors" had tried to show that the nineteenth-century
commercialist spirit was not new; that the tyranny of capital was the
old sin of usury over again; and he asked why preachers of religion did
not denounce it--why, for example, the Bishop of Manchester did not, on
simply religious grounds, oppose the teaching of the "Manchester
School," who were the chief supporters of the commercialist economy. Not
until the end of 1879 had Dr. Fraser been aware of the challenge; but at
length he wrote, justifying his attitude. The popular and able bishop
had much to say on the expediency of the commercial system and the error
of taking the Bible literally; but he seemed unaware of the revolution
in economical thought which "Unto this Last" an