nt; but to
some observers it seems to have described rather a curve than a steady
ascent. After being, between 1840 and 1860, laughed at, despised,
attacked all at once, Mr. Ruskin found his influence as an art teacher
rise steadily during the seventh decade of the century, and attain its
highest point about the close thereof, when he was made Slade Professor
in his own university, and caused young Oxford to do many fantastic
things. But, as always happens, the hour of triumph was the hour, not,
perhaps, of downfall, but of opposition and renegation. Side by side
with Mr. Ruskin's own theories had risen the doctrine of Art-for-Art's
sake, which, itself as usual half truth and half nonsense, cut at the
very root of Ruskinism. On the other hand, the practical centre of
art-schools had shifted from Italy and Germany to Paris and its
neighbourhood, where morality has seldom been able to make anything like
a home; and the younger painters and sculptors, full of realism,
impressionism, and what not, would have none of the doctrines which, as
a matter of fact, stood in immediate relationship of antecedence to
their own. Lastly, it must be admitted that the extreme dogmatism on all
the subjects of the encyclopedia in which Mr. Ruskin had seen fit to
indulge, was certain to provoke a revolt. But with the substance of
Ruskinism, further than is necessary for comprehension, we are not
concerned.

Yet there are not many things in the English nineteenth century with
which a historian is more concerned than with the style of the
deliverance of these ideas. We have noticed in former chapters--we shall
have to notice yet more in the conclusion--the attempts made in the
years just preceding and immediately following Mr. Ruskin's birth, by
Landor, by De Quincey, by Wilson, and by others in the direction of
ornate, of--as some call it--_flamboyant_ English prose. All the
tendencies thus enumerated found their crown and flower in Mr. Ruskin
himself. That later the crowns and the flowers were, so to speak,
divided, varied, and multiplied by later practitioners, some of whom
will presently be noticed, while more are still alive, is quite true.
But in 1895 it is not very unsafe to prophesy that the _flamboyant_
style of the nineteenth century will be found by posterity to have
reached its highest exposition in prose with Mr. Ruskin himself.

Like all great prose styles--and the difference between prose and poetry
here is very remarkable--th