sm.
He discouraged--without in the least meaning to do so, and indeed
meaning quite the contrary--simplicity and unaffectedness in style. But
he was a most powerful stimulus, and in some ways, if not in all, a
great example. Some at least of the things he said were in the very
greatest need of saying, and some of the ways in which he said them were
inimitably charming.

Contemporary with Mr. Arnold, and his complement in critical influence,
was John Ruskin, the sole living author of whom it has seemed proper to
treat here at length, and, since the death of Mr. Froude, the sole
surviving man of letters of the first class who had published before the
middle of the century. He was born in 1819: he has given copious
accounts of his family, of his youth at Denmark Hill, and so forth, and
all the world knows that his father was a sherry merchant who, though he
lived rather plainly, was able to give his son an early and plentiful
indulgence in that Continental travel which had so much to do with
developing his genius. Mr. Ruskin's education was oddly combined; for,
after going to no school, he was sent to Christ Church as a
gentleman-commoner and took his degree in 1842, having gained the
Newdigate three years earlier. He wrote a good deal of other verse in
his early years,--and he made himself a not inconsiderable draughtsman.
But his real vocation was as little the practice of art as it was the
practice of poetry. As early as 1843 there appeared, by "a Graduate of
Oxford," the first volume of the famous _Modern Painters_, which ran to
five large volumes, which covered seventeen years in its original period
of publication, and which was very largely altered and remodelled by the
author during and after this period. But Mr. Ruskin by no means confined
his energies before 1860 to this extensive task. The _Seven Lamps of
Architecture_ (1849), and (between 1851 and 1853) the larger _Stones of
Venice_, did for architecture what the companion work did for painting.
The Prae-Raphaelite movement of the middle of the century found in Mr.
Ruskin an ardent encomiast and literary apostle, and between 1850 and
1860 he delivered divers lectures, the text of which--_Architecture and
Painting_ (1854), _Political Economy of Art_ (1858)--was subsequently
published in as elaborately magnificent a style as his other works. As
_Modern Painters_ drew to its close he became prolific of more numerous
and shorter works, generally with somewhat fantas