is was born nearly full grown. The instances
of comparison in those who have tried both harmonies are rare; those in
poets only are delusive and uncertain. But with the three greatest poets
of England who have also been great prose writers, Milton, Dryden,
Shelley, the assertion that the distinctive quality of their prose
developed itself earlier than the distinctive quality of their verse is
only disputable in the case of Milton. And Milton, as it happened, wrote
prose and verse in manners more nearly approaching each other than any
one on record. Mr. Ruskin has not been a poet, except in extreme
minority; but he has been a great prose writer from the first. It is
almost inconceivable that good judges can ever have had any doubt about
him. It is perfectly--it is, indeed, childishly easy to pick faults,
even if matter be kept wholly out of sight. In Mr. Ruskin's later books
a certain tendency to conversational familiarity sometimes mocks those,
and not those only, who hold to the tradition of dignified and _ex
cathedra_ pronouncement; in his earlier, and in all, it is possible for
Momus to note an undue floridness, an inclination to blank verse in
prose, tricks and manners of this or that kind unduly exuberant and
protuberant.

But when all these things have been allowed for to the very fullest,
what an enormous advance there is on anything that had gone before! The
ornate prose writers of the seventeenth century had too frequently
regarded their libraries only; they had seldom looked abroad to the vast
field of nature, and of art other than literary art. The ornate writers
of the eighteenth, great as they were, had been as afraid of
introspection as of looking outwards, and had spun their webs, so far as
style and ornament were concerned, of words only. Those of the early
nineteenth had been conscious of revolt, and, like all conscious
revolters, had not possessed their souls in sufficient quietness and
confidence. Landor, half a classic and half a Romantic, had been too
much the slave of phrase,--though of a great phrase. Wilson, impatient
in everything, had fluctuated between grandeur and _galimatias_, bathos
and bad taste; De Quincey, at times supreme, had at others simply
succumbed to "rigmarole." Mr. Ruskin had a gift of expression equal to
the best of these men; and, unlike them, he had an immense, a steady, a
uniform group of models before him. Indulge as he might in extravagance,
there were always before him, a