which Time and Tide closely followed. Ruskin now turned to Greek mythology, and published in 1869 his fanciful treatment of legends, called The Queen of the Air. Having defined his social Utopia and given free scope to his theories and his prejudices, Ruskin now returned in some measure to the exposition of fine art, being in 1869 elected Slade Professor at the University of Oxford. His lectures, which were delivered in a most unconventional way, were very largely attended, and there is no doubt that they exercised a great influence on opinion; they were collected and printed in nine successive

volumes, most of them bearing very fantastic titles. He was elected a Fellow of Corpus, and partly resided in that college from 1871 onwards. His mother now died, and Ruskin bought the property of Brantwood, with a house on Coniston Lake, in a very beautiful situation; he enlarged and improved this place until he had made it a fitting hermitage for the closing scenes of his life. At Oxford and elsewhere, particularly at Sheffield, he now began a series of industrial experiments, many of which he endowed with conspicuous generosity, and he founded the much-talked of "St. George's Guild," a preposterous co-operative attempt to ally commercial industry to art and science, upon which he wasted immense sums of money. In 1872 he was refused in marriage by a young girl, Rose La Touche, for whom he had formed a romantic and extravagant passion which he believed to be mutual; in 1875 she died, having declined, with strange cruelty, to see Ruskin on her deathbed; he never recovered from the violent emotions caused by this double repulse. From 1871 to 1884 Ruskin was occupied in writing and publishing his Fors Clavigera, a sort of running open letter addressed to the working-men of England, but chiefly read by a more highly-educated class; this occasional publication was awaited with extraordinary eagerness, and each number opened out fresh fields of controversy. It was during the appearance of Fors, perhaps, that Ruskin rose to his greatest height of personal eminence. It was no doubt connected with the excessive labour of correspondence, lecturing, and general public activity, that in 1878 his health broke down; he was obliged in 1879 to resign his

[Abraham, Keswick John Ruskin's Grave at Coniston

professorship, and he withdrew to Brantwood. After some months of complete retirement he was able to resume work on The Bible of Amiens, an ambitious treatise on architecture as applied to the history of Christendom, on which he was busy from 1880 to 1885; and he superintended the collection of his public correspondence in Arrows of the Chace (1880). But in 1882 another attack of brain disease prostrated him, and though he was re-elected Slade Professor at Oxford he was not happy there. He withdrew again, and this time finally, out of the world; from 1884 to 1900 he never left Brantwood. Here, in lucid intervals, he wrote and sent forth his autobiographic notes, Præterita, the latest important production of Ruskin. He had by this time given away or distributed in Quixotic enterprises the whole of his parental fortune, amounting, it is said, to nearly a quarter of a million-"his pensioners were numbered by hundreds "—his works, however, formed a valuable source of income. He was left, by the death of Tennyson in 1892, unquestionably the most eminent of living English writers, and he received every token of popular respect and esteem. His brain-power, however, though not positively clouded, was greatly enfeebled, and for the last ten years of his life he took no part in affairs. He suffered from no long disease, but towards the close of his eighty-first year, after three days' decline of strength, he passed quietly away at Brantwood on the 20th of January 1900. His intellectual activity and power of literary work had been prodigious, and yet their exercise had left him time to produce innumerable water-colour and pencil drawings of an exquisite finish. He was liable to be torn, all his life through, by conflicting storms of rage and hatred and despair, but found refuge from them in what he held to be "the only constant form of true religion, namely, useful work and faithful love and stintless charity." Ruskin was tall and spare, with a face the serenity and fulness of the upper part of which was injured by something almost cruel in the expression of the mouth; this was rectified in later life by the growth of a magnificent white beard. He lies buried in the churchyard of Coniston, a funeral in Westminster Abbey being refused by his family at his express direction.

FROM "MODERN PAINTERS, I."

But, I think, the noblest sea that Turner has ever painted, and, if so, the noblest certainly ever painted by man, is that of the Slave Ship, the chief Academy picture of the Exhibition of 1840. It is a sunset on the Atlantic, after prolonged storm; but the storm is partially lulled, and the torn and streaming rain-clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the hollow of the night. The whole surface of sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low, broad, heaving of the whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by deep breath after the torture of the storm. Between these two ridges the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendour which burns like gold, and bathes like blood. Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly divided, lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fantastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined foam. They do not rise everywhere, but three or four together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the under strength of the swell compels or permits them; leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamp-like fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining sun, now fearfully dyed from above with the indistinguishable images of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery flying. Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon

the mist of the night, which gathers cold and low, advancing like the shadow of death upon the guilty ship as it labours amidst the lightning of the sea, its thin masts written upon the sky in lines of blood, guided with condemnation in that fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight,-and cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea.

FROM "THE ELEMENTS OF DRAWING."

It only wastes the time and dulls the feelings of young persons, to drag them through picture galleries; at least, unless they themselves wish to look at particular pictures. Generally, young people only care to enter a picture gallery when there is a chance of getting leave to run a race to the other end of it; and they had better do that in the garden below. If, however, they have any real enjoyment of pictures, and want to look at this one or that, the principal point is never to disturb them in looking at what interests them, and never to make them look at what does not. Nothing is of the least use to young people (nor, by the way, of much use to old ones), but what interests them; and therefore, though it is of great importance to put nothing but good art into their possession, yet, when they are passing through great houses or galleries, they should be allowed to look precisely at what pleases them: if it is not useful to them as art, it will be in some other way; and the healthiest way in which art can interest them is when they look at it, not as art, but because it represents something they like in Nature. If a boy has had his heart filled by the life of some great man, and goes up thirstily to a Vandyck portrait of him to see what he was like, that is the wholesomest way in which he can begin the study of portraiture; if he loves mountains, and dwells on a Turner drawing because he sees in it a likeness to a Yorkshire scar or an Alpine pass, that is the wholesomest way in which he can begin the study of landscape; and if a girl's mind is filled with dreams of angels and saints, and she pauses before an Angelico because she thinks it must surely be like heaven, that is the right way for her to begin the study of religious art."

The excessive popularity enjoyed by the writings of JOHN STUART MILL at Mill the time of his death has already undergone great diminution, and will probably continue to shrink. This eminent empirical philosopher was a very honest man, no sophist, no rhetorician, but one who, in a lucid, intelligible, convincing style, placed before English readers views of an advanced character, with the value of which he was sincerely impressed. The world has since smiled at the precocious artificiality of his education, and has shrunk from something arid and adust in the character of the man. Early associated with Carlyle, he did not allow himself to be infected by Carlylese, but carefully studied and imitated the French philosophers. His System of Logic and his Political Economy placed his scientific reputation on a firm basis. But Mill could be excited, and even violent, in the cause of his convictions, and he produced a wider, if not a deeper impression by his remarkable sociological essays on Liberty and the Subjection of Women. He is, unfortunately for the durability of his writings, fervid without being exhilarating. Sceptical and dry, precise and plain, his works inspire respect, but do not attract new generations of admirers.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was the eldest son of the philosopher, James Mill (1773-1836), and was born in Rodney Street, Pentonville, London, on the 20th of May 1806; his mother's name was Harriet Burrow. At the time of his birth, his father was engaged on the History of India, published, in three volumes, in 1817. James Mill undertook at a preposterously early age the education of his