culture. He easily won the Newdigate prize in poetry;
his rooms in Christ Church were hung with excellent examples of
Turner's landscapes,--the gift of his art-loving father,--of which he
had been an intimate student ever since the age of thirteen. But his
course was interrupted by an illness, apparently of a tuberculous
nature, which necessitated total relaxation and various trips in Italy
and Switzerland, where he seems to have been healed by walking among
his beloved Alps. For many years thereafter he passed months of his
time in these two countries, accompanied sometimes by his parents and
sometimes rather luxuriously, it seems, by valet and guide.

[Sidenote: Career as an author begins.]

Meanwhile he had commenced his career as author with the first volume
of _Modern Painters_, begun, the world knows, as a short defense of
Turner, originally intended for nothing more than a magazine article.
But the role of art-critic and law-giver pleased the youth,--he was
only twenty-four when the volume appeared,--and having no desire to
realize the ambition of his parents and become a bishop, and even less
to duplicate his father's career as vintner, he gladly seized the
opportunity thus offered him to develop his aesthetic vein and to
redeem the public mind from its vulgar apathy thereby. He continued
his work on _Modern Painters_, with some intermissions, for eighteen
years, and supplemented it with the equally famous _Seven Lamps of
Architecture_ in 1849, and _The Stones of Venice_ in 1853.

[Sidenote: Domestic troubles.]

This life of zealous work and brilliant recognition was interrupted in
1848 by Ruskin's amazing marriage to Miss Euphemia Gray, a union into
which he entered at the desire of his parents with a docility as
stupid as it was stupendous. Five years later the couple were quietly
divorced, that Mrs. Ruskin might marry Millais. All the author's
biographers maintain an indiscreet reserve in discussing the affair,
but there can be no concealment of the fact that its effect upon
Ruskin was profound in its depression. Experiences like this and his
later sad passion for Miss La Touche at once presage and indicate his
mental disorder, and no doubt had their share--a large one--in
causing Ruskin's dissatisfaction with everything, and above all with
his own life and work. Be this as it may, it is at this time in the
life of Ruskin that we must begin to reckon with the decline of his
aesthetic and the rise of his e