Opening other—excluding his more voluminous—books, 'Love's Meinie' or 'Proserpina' to wit—the one of birds and the other of flowers—what exquisite passages meet us on every page! What Ruskinite does not revel in such as those contrasting the flight of the eagle and the seagull with that of the swallow, or as that speaking of 'the beauty of the bird that lives with you in your own houses, and which purifies for you, from its insect pestilence, the air that you breathe. Thus the sweet domestic thing has done, for men, at least, these four thousand years. She has been their companion, not of the home merely, but of the hearth, and the threshold; companion only endeared by departure, and showing better her loving-kindness by her faithful return.' She is a type of the stranger, or the supplicant, herald of our summer, 'who glances through our days of gladness'—and he gives us much more of the same sweet poetry about her. Then there are sentences like that outburst of joy at the discovery of the blue asphodel in the fields beyond Monte Mario—'a spire two feet high, of more than two hundred stars, the stalks of them all deep blue as well as the flowers. Heaven send all honest people the gathering of the like, in Elysian fields, some day!'

Ruskin confessed ignorance of the writings of political economists, of which he had read none but Adam Smith's—twenty years before—and his continual travesty of them as though 'buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest'—labour included—was their sole message to the world, makes it difficult to quote from his more philosophical or social science works. It must be remembered that Smith had forestalled Ruskin in stating that wage-earners had a right to a living wage, and that others, like Jeremy Bentham, had forestalled him in the doctrine of the 'greatest good of the greatest number' underlying his own strictures on our land system.

In his usual contradictory way he sometimes tells us the sword must still be whetted to settle international disputes. At others he calls war the mother of all evils, and writes paragraphs worthy of Carlyle on the French and English villagers from their respective Drumdrudges, pitying the peasantry upon whom the losses and cruelties fall, and denouncing the squires who officer them and lead them to death. Women he calls upon to exercise their influence in favour of peace, because they can, if they will, put an end to all wars for ever. The idleness of the upper classes, and the seeking of outlets for their capital by financial speculators are, he says, its chief causes, and ill-accumulated moneys are spent on it. In all this an ever-increasing multitude of Christians agree with him, as well as in his denunciation of the inhumanity of mere mercenary commerce uncontrolled by consideration for others, and in his pleadings for purer and happier homes, equal opportunities of education, and the glory and grace of honest labour. When a man who has done much for the good of his fellows can write of Ruskin in the second phase of his literary career, 'to him I owe the guidance of my life, all its best impulses, and its worthiest efforts,' we may be sure his later books were really great, notwithstanding their blemishes.

JOHN RUSKIN'S HANDWRITING IN ADVANCED LIFE

MEDALLION ON THE RUSKIN MEMORIAL, DERWENTWATER

By A.C. Lucchesi

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