tic but agreeable
titles--_Unto this Last_ (1861), _Munera Pulveris_ (1862), _Sesame and
Lilies_ (1865), _The Cestus of Aglaia_ (1865), _The Ethics of the Dust_
(1866), _The Crown of Wild Olive_ (1866), _Time and Tide by Wear and
Tyne_ (1867), _The Queen of the Air_ (1869), _Aratra Pentelici_ and _The
Eagle's Nest_ (1872), _Ariadne Florentina_ (1873), _Proserpina and
Deucalion_ (1875 _seq._), _St. Mark's Rest_ and _Praeterita_ (1885). Not
a few of these were issued in parts and numbers, but Mr. Ruskin's
bulkiest and most characteristic venture in this kind was _Fors
Clavigera_, which was published at irregular intervals from 1871 to
1884. He has written many other things even in book form, besides
innumerable essays and letters, some of which have been collected in two
gatherings--_Arrows of the Chace_ and _On the Old Road_.

Two things are mainly perceptible in this immense and at first sight
rather bewildering production. The first, the most disputable and
probably the least important, though the most at the author's heart, is
a vast, fluctuating, but on the whole pretty coherent body of doctrine
in reference to Art. Up to Mr. Ruskin's day, aesthetics had been little
cultivated in England, and such handlings of the subject as
existed--Burke's, Adam Smith's, Alison's, and a few others--were of a
jejune and academic character. Even writers of distinct literary genius
and of great taste for the matter, who had not resided abroad long, such
as Hazlitt, much more such as Charles Lamb and Hartley Coleridge, betray
the want of range and practice in examples. Even the valuable and
interesting work of Mrs. Jameson (1794-1860) was more occupied with
careful arrangement and attractive illustration than with original
theory; and, well as she wrote, her _Characteristics of Shakespeare's
Women_ (1832) is perhaps more important as literature than the series of
volumes--_Sacred and Legendary Art_, etc.--which she executed between
1845 and her death. The sense of the endless and priceless illustration
of the best art which was provided by Gothic domestic and ecclesiastical
architecture was only wakening; as for painting, the examples publicly
visible in England were very few, and even private collections were
mostly limited to one or two fashionable schools--Raphael and his
successors, the later Low Country schools, the French painters in the
grand style, and a few Spaniards.

Strongly impressed by the Romantic revival (he has all hi