rshalton.
Now, it would not be easy, perhaps, to prove that God made those "pools
and streams," still lovely in their degradation, in a sense in which he
did _not_ make the human beings who have "insolently defiled" them; but
we may at least say that the human will was concerned not only in the
"defiling" but in the production of the defilers, while it was _not_
concerned in the production of those "pools and streams." And we may
conjecture that if Mr. Ruskin had been asked to decide whether the
"pools and streams" should retain their original clearness and beauty,
and the human beings remain unproduced, or whether the latter should
come into existence and the "pools and streams" be defiled--he would
have stood for the first alternative. But if he afterwards followed out
his decision to its consequence, it would make an end of what Mr. Bayne
rightly calls the "communistic" element in his writings. It is painfully
certain that if Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth had been disgusted by "people
from Birthwaite" before the "Excursion" was written, that poem would
have been very different here and there.

* * * * *

Mr. John Addington Symonds writes much, and he writes with absorbing
pains. When he called his new book _Sketches and Studies in Italy_
(Smith, Elder, & Co.), had he forgotten a previous title of his,
_Sketches in Italy and Greece_? In any case there is a wide difference
between the two volumes; in the former we had more of the traveller, in
the latter we have more of the scholar, though the traveller is still
present; for instance, in the Essay, "Amalfi, Paestum, Capri," and in the
"Lombard Vignettes." In the Essay on the "Orfeo" of Poliziano, and that
on the "Popular Italian Poetry of the Renaissance," we are again glad to
recognize the author's masterly power in certain kinds of translation;
and those the kinds in which the labourers are few, though the harvest
is so large. In about seventy pages, close pages it is true, Mr. Symonds
presents us with a sketch of Florentine history, the like of which, for
compactness and minuteness of information, one knows not where to seek.
Mr. Symonds is a striking example of the modern school of
"culture"--using that word in its more special sense. Unwearied in the
pursuit of detail, it occasionally tires the reader. There is a want of
emphasis--not to say a shamefaced avoidance of it; there is the want of
grasp which comes of the absence of hearty cont