dwelling-house architecture of the period. . . . The churches were not
separated by any change of style from the buildings round them, as they
are now, but were merely more finished and full examples of a universal
style. . . . Because the Gothic and Byzantine styles are fit for
churches, they are not therefore less fit for dwellings. They are in the
highest sense fit and good for both, nor were they ever brought to
perfection except when they were used for both." [30]

The influence of Walter Scott upon Ruskin is noteworthy. As a child he
read the Bible on Sundays and the Waverley Novels on week-days, and he
could not recall the time when either had been unknown to him. The
freshness of his pleasure in the first sight of the frescoes of the Campo
Santo he describes by saying that it was like having three new Scott
novels.[31] Ruskin called himself a "king's man," a "violent illiberal,"
and a "Tory of the old-fashioned school, the school of Walter Scott."
Like Scott, he was proof against the religious temptations of
mediaevalism. "Although twelfth-century psalters are lovely and right,"
he was not converted to Catholic teachings by his admiration for the art
of the great ages; and writes, with a touch of contempt, of those who are
"piped into a new creed by the squeak of an organ pipe." If Scott was
unclassical, Ruskin was anti-classical. The former would learn no Greek;
and the latter complained that Oxford taught him all the Latin and Greek
that he would learn, but did not teach him that fritillaries grew in
Iffley meadow.[32] Even that fondness for costume which has been made a
reproach against Scott finds justification with Ruskin. "The essence of
modern romance is simply the return of the heart and fancy to the things
in which they naturally take pleasure; and half the influence of the best
romances, of 'Ivanhoe,' or 'Marmion,' or 'The Crusaders,' or 'The Lady of
the Lake,' is completely dependent upon the accessories of armour and
costume." [33] Still Ruskin had the critical good sense to rate such as
they below the genuine Scotch novels, like "Old Mortality" and "The Heart
of Mid-Lothian"; and he is quite stern towards the melodramatic Byronic
ideal of Venice. "The impotent feelings of romance, so singularly
characteristic of this century, may indeed gild, but never save the
remains of those mightier ages to which they are attached like climbing
flowers, and they must be torn away from the magnificen