were crowded and editions exhausted by the ladies and gentlemen of England, whose nerves were pleasantly thrilled with a gentle surprise on being told that they had despised literature, art, science, nature, and compassion, and that what they thought upon any subject was “a matter of no serious importance”; that they could not be said to have any thoughts at all—­indeed, no right to think.[19] The fiercer his anathemas, the greater the applause; the louder he shouted, the better he pleased.  Let him split the ears of the groundlings, let him out-Herod Herod,—­the judicious might grieve, but all would be excitedly attentive.  Their Jeremiah seemed at times like to become a jester,—­there was a suggestion of the ludicrous in the sudden passage from birds to Greek coins, to mills, to Walter Scott, to millionaire malefactors,—­a suggestion of acrobatic tumbling and somersault; but he always got a hearing.  In lecturing to the students of a military academy he had the pleasing audacity to begin: 

“Young soldiers, I do not doubt but that many of you came unwillingly to-night, and many of you in merely contemptuous curiosity, to hear what a writer on painting could possibly say, or would venture to say, respecting your great art of war";[20]

after which stinging challenge, one has no doubt, any feeling of offense was swallowed up in admiration of the speaker’s physical courage.

[Sidenote:  Influence of Carlyle upon Ruskin.]

[Sidenote:  The unity of Ruskin’s style.]

There can be little doubt that this later manner in which Ruskin allowed his Puritan instincts to defeat his aestheticism, and indulged to an alarming degree his gift of vituperation, was profoundly influenced by his “master,” Carlyle, who had long since passed into his later and raucous manner.  Carlyle’s delight in the disciple’s diatribes probably encouraged the younger man in a vehemence of invective to which his love of dogmatic assertion already rendered him too prone.  At his best, Ruskin, like Carlyle, reminds us of a major prophet; at his worst he shrieks and heats the air.  His high indignations lead him into all manner of absurdity and self-contradiction.  An amusing instance of this may be given from Sesame and Lilies.  In the first lecture, which, it will be recalled, was given in aid of a library fund, we find[21] the remark, “We are filthy and foolish enough to thumb one another’s books out of circulating libraries.”  His friends and his enemies, the clergy (who “teach a false gospel for hire”) and the scientists, the merchants and the universities, Darwin and Dante, all had their share in the indignant lecturer’s indiscriminate abuse.  And yet in all the tropical luxuriance of his inconsistency, one can never doubt the man’s sincerity.  He never wrote for effect.  He may dazzle us, but his fire is never pyrotechnical; it always springs from the deep volcanic heart of him.  His was a fervor too easily stirred and often ill-directed,