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 earnestness did much, not only for the elevation of his fellow-men, but for the development of sound artistic taste and the enriching and spiritualizing of life by seeking to surround it at all times with the true and the beautiful, and with the old-time virtues of purity, manliness, and courage.

Among the “Beacon Lights” of the age there can be no question that Ruskin is worthy of an exalted place, since few men of our modern time, rich as it is in eminent thinkers and writers, has done more than he to illumine the many subjects with which he has so fascinatingly dealt,—­and that not only in art and its cult of the Beautiful, but in ethics, education, and political economy.  The energies, activities, and impulses he constantly put forth, as well as the high principles that ever guided him in his earnest endeavor to improve the intellectual and moral condition of his kind, mark his era as a great artistic epoch in the onward and upward progress of the race.  By stimulus, suggestion, and inspiration he has powerfully influenced his time, though manifestly