manitarian as
well as practically helpful were Ruskin's counsel and aid to labor and
to all who sought to raise and expand their outlook and better their
condition in life. Towards politics Ruskin was never drawn, but had he
been more prosaic and less given to anathematizing, most valuable would
have been his aid in legislation at this era of political and moral
reform. But if political science, or science in any other of its
branches or departments, did not come within his purview, great was the
revolution he wrought in the working-man's surroundings, and immense the
illumination he shed upon industry and on the spirit in which the
laborer should think and work.

Referring to Ruskin at this period of his career, and to his influence
as a social and moral exhorter, Frederic Harrison, from whom we have
already quoted, has an admirable passage on "Ruskin as Prophet," [2]
which, as it is presumably too little known, we take pleasure in
embodying in these pages.

[Footnote 2: "Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and other Literary Estimates," by
Frederic Harrison; London and New York: Macmillan & Co. 1900.]

"The influence of Ruskin," says Mr. Harrison, "has been part of the
great romantic, historical, catholic, and poetic revival of which
Scott, Carlyle, Coleridge, Freeman, Newman, and Tennyson in our own
country have been leading spirits within the last two generations in
England. There is no need to compare him with any one of these as a
source of original intellectual force. He owns Scott and Carlyle as his
masters, and he might vehemently repudiate certain of the others
altogether. His work has been to put this romantic, historical, and
genuine sympathy inspired by Scott, Wordsworth, and Carlyle into a new
understanding of the arts of form. The philosophic impulse assuredly was
not his own. It is a compound of Scott, Carlyle, Dante, and the Bible.
The compound is strange, for it makes him talk sometimes like a Puritan
father, and sometimes like a Cistercian monk. At times he talks as Flora
MacIvor talked to young Waverley; at other times like Thomas Carlyle
inditing a Latter-day Pamphlet. But to transfuse into this modern
generation of Englishmen this romantic, catholic, historical, and social
sympathy as applied to the arts of form, needed gifts that neither
Scott, nor Carlyle, nor Newman, nor Tennyson possessed--the eye, if not
the hand, of a consummate landscape painter, a torrent of ready
eloquence on every imaginable topic