and wages shall be maintained; (3) that any person out of employment shall be received at the nearest government school:  if ignorant he shall be educated, and if competent to do any work he shall have the opportunity to do it; (4) that comfortable homes be provided for the sick and for the aged, and that this be done in justice, not in charity.  A laborer serves his country as truly as does a soldier or a statesman, and a pension should be no more disgraceful in one case than in the other.

Among Ruskin’s numerous books treating of art, we recommend the Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), Stones of Venice (1851-1853), and the first two volumes of Modern Painters (1843-1846).  With Ruskin’s art theories, which, as Sydney Smith prophesied, “worked a complete revolution in the world of taste,” we need not concern ourselves here.  We simply point out four principles that are manifest in all his work:  (1) that the object of art, as of every other human endeavor, is to find and to express the truth; (2) that art, in order to be true, must break away from conventionalities and copy nature; (3) that morality is closely allied with art, and that a careful study of any art reveals the moral strength or weakness of the people that produced it; (4) that the main purpose of art is not to delight a few cultured people but to serve the daily uses of common life.  “The giving brightness to pictures is much,” he says, “but the giving brightness to life is more.”  In this attempt to make art serve the practical ends of life, Ruskin is allied with all the great writers of the period, who use literature as the instrument of human progress.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.  One who reads Ruskin is in a state of mind analogous to that of a man who goes through a picture gallery, pausing now to admire a face or a landscape for its own sake, and again to marvel at the technical skill of the artist, without regard to his subject.  For Ruskin is a great literary artist and a great ethical teacher, and we admire one page for its style, and the next for its message to humanity.  The best of his prose, which one may find in the descriptive passages of Praeterita and Modern Painters, is written in a richly ornate style, with a wealth of figures and allusions, and at times a rhythmic, melodious quality which makes it almost equal to poetry.  Ruskin had a rare sensitiveness to beauty in every form, and more, perhaps, than any other writer in our language, he has helped us to see and appreciate the beauty of the world around us.

As for Ruskin’s ethical teaching, it appears in so many forms and in so many different works that any summary must appear inadequate.  For a full half century he was “the apostle of beauty” in England, and the beauty for which he pleaded was never sensuous or pagan, as in the Renaissance, but always spiritual, appealing to the soul of man rather than to his eyes, leading to better work and better