for his weaknesses and perverseness,--for his dogmatisms, his
fervors, and ecstasies, his exaggerations of praise and blame, and even
for the missionary propagation of his often unsound economic gospel,
valuable though it may be in illustrating and enforcing morality in its
aesthetic aspect. Despite his enemies, and all that the critics have
said contradicting his theories, Ruskin was a surprise and a revelation
to his time. In not a little of all that he said and did, it is true, we
cannot concur; nor can we fail to see the errors he fell into through
his want of reserve and his headlong haste to say and do the things he
said and did; nevertheless, he was a great and inspiring teacher in
things that appeal to our sense of the beautiful, and earnest in his
zeal to raise men's intellectual and moral standard of life. Like most
enthusiasts and geniuses, he had, now and then, his hours of reaction,
waywardness, and gloom; but there was much that was noble and ennobling
in the man, as well as rich and fructifying in his thought. Even in his
social and moral exhortations, tinctured as they are with medievalism,
and however much we may here again disagree with him, he had much that
was uplifting and inspiring to say to his time,--a time that had great
need of his apostolic counsellings and his fervent inculcations of
morality, industry, religion, and humanity.

Throughout Mr. Ruskin's works--and they are amazingly manifold--a strong
and intense purpose runs, given to the highest and noblest ends; and
though their author at times wearies his reader by his diffuseness and
his digressions, and to some is almost fanatical in his reverence for
art, he is ever imaginative and eloquent, and has created for us a new,
instructive, and uniquely fresh and thoughtful body of art-literature.
The truth of infinite value he teaches is "realism,"--the doctrine that
all truth and beauty are to be attained by a reverent and faithful study
of nature, and not, as a reviewer expresses it, "by substituting vague
forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of
definite, substantial reality. The thorough acceptance of this doctrine
would remould our life; and he who teaches its application, even to any
single department of human activity, and with such power as Mr.
Ruskin's, is a prophet for his generation." In all his various labors
and aims, Mr. Ruskin set before himself a high, if somewhat quixotic,
ideal of life, and with great e