ect
his fallacies would almost consent to forfeit the power of detecting, if
they could acquire that of constructing, such delightful paralogisms.
His crotchets of all sorts are sometimes merely childish, and not even
always or very often original; for, like all fertile minds, he never
could receive any seed of thought from another but it bore plant and
fruit at once. But the statement of them is at its best so captivating
that weaklings may pardonably accept, and strong men may justly
tolerate, the worthless kernel for the sake of the exquisite husk. Few
men have less of the true spirit of criticism than Mr. Ruskin, for in
his enthusiasm he will compass sea and land to exalt his favourite,
often for reasons which are perfectly invalid; and in his appreciation
he is not to be trusted at all, having a feminine rather than a
masculine faculty of unreasoned dislike. But praise or blame, argue or
paralogise as he may, the golden beauty of his form redeems his matter
in the eyes of all but those who are unhappy enough not to see it.

That his influence has been wholly good no one can say. There is
scarcely a page of him that can be safely accepted on the whole as
matter, and the unwary have accepted whole volumes; his form is
peculiarly liable to abuse in the way of imitation, and it has actually
been abused to nausea and to ridicule. But this is not his fault. There
is so little subtlety about Mr. Ruskin that he can hardly deceive even
an intelligent child when he goes wrong. There is so much genius about
him that the most practised student of English can never have done with
admiration at the effects that he produces, after all these centuries,
with the old material and the old tools. He is constantly provocative of
adverse, even of severe criticism; of half the heresies from which he
has suffered--not only that of impressionism--he was himself the
unconscious heresiarch. And yet the more one reads him the more one
feels inclined almost to let him go uncriticised, to vote him the
primacy in nineteenth-century prose by simple acclamation.

Richard (or as his full name ran), John Richard Jefferies, occupies,
though an infinitely smaller and a considerably lower place than Mr.
Ruskin's, yet one almost as distinctly isolated in a particular
department of aesthetic description. The son of a farmer at Coate, in
North Wiltshire, and born in November 1848, he began journalism at
eighteen, and was a contributor to the _North Wilts