s on a vastly extended dais set before
the student, the glories of nature and of art, the great personalities
and productions of the great artists. He had seen, and he could see
(which is a different thing), the perennial beauties of mountain and
cloud, of tree, and sea, and river; the beauties long, if not perennial,
of architecture and painting. A man may say foolish things,--Mr. Ruskin
has said plenty; but when he has Venice and Amiens and Salisbury, the
Alps and the Jura and the Rhine, Scott and Wordsworth, Turner and
Lionardo, always silently present before his mind's eye, he can never,
if he is a man of genius, go wholly wrong. And he can never go more than
a little wrong when he is furnished by his genius with such a gift of
expression as Mr. Ruskin has had.

For this gift of expression was such as had never been seen before, and
such as, for all the copying and vulgarising of it, has never been seen
since. It is a commonplace of literary history that description, as
such, is not common or far advanced in the earlier English prose. We
find Gray, far on in the eighteenth century, trying to describe a
sunrise, and evidently vexed at the little "figure it makes on paper."
Then the tourists and the travellers of the end of that age made valiant
but not always well directed efforts to induce "it" to make a figure on
paper. Then came the experts or student-interpreters in ornate prose who
have been mentioned. And then came Mr. Ruskin. "Never so before and
never quite so since," must be the repeated verdict. The first
sprightly runnings in these, as in other kinds, are never surpassed.
Kingsley, an almost contemporary, Mr. Swinburne, a younger rival, have
come near; others have done creditably in imitation; none have equalled,
and certainly none have surpassed. Let the reader read the "Wave
Studies" in the first volume of _Modern Painters_, more than fifty years
old; the "Pine Forest in the Jura," almost forty; the "Angel of the
Sea," fully thirty-five, and say, if he has any knowledge of English
literature, whether there had been anything like any of these before.
Shelley, perhaps, in some of his prose had gone near it. Shelley was
almost as great a prose writer as he was a poet. No one else could even
be mentioned.

Nor was it mere description, great as Mr. Ruskin is in that, which
differentiated him so strongly. He is a bad arguer; but his arguments
are couched in rhetoric so persuasive that the very critics who det