' What was the use of thinking
about _him_? You should have had your own thoughts about what was
to come after him. I don't mean that Roman Catholicism will die out
so quickly. It will last pretty nearly as long as Protestantism,
which keeps it up; but I wonder what is to come next. That is the
main question just now for everybody."

W.J. Stillman had been a correspondent about 1851,--"involved in
mystical speculations, partly growing out of the second volume of
'Modern Painters,'" as he said of himself in an article on "John Ruskin"
in the _Century_ Magazine (January, 1888). With him Ruskin spent July
and August of 1860 at Chamouni. He did but little drawing, and in the
few sketches that remain of that summer there is evidence that his mind
was far away from its old love of mountains and of streamlets. His
lonely walks in the pinewoods of the Arveron were given to meditation on
a great problem which had been set, as it seemed, for him to solve, ever
since he had written that chapter on "The Nature of Gothic." Now at
last, in the solitude of the Alps, he could grapple with the questions
he had raised; and the outcome of the struggle was "Unto this Last."

The year before, from Thun and Bonneville and Lausanne (August and
September, 1859) he had written letters to E.S. Dallas, suggested by the
strikes in the London building trade. In these he appears to have
sketched the outline of a new conception of social science, which he was
now elaborating with more attempt at system and brevity than he had been
accustomed to use.

These new papers, painfully thought out and carefully set down in his
room at the Hotel de l'Union, he used--as long before he read his daily
chapter to the breakfast party at Herne Hill--to read to Stillman: and
he sent them to the _Cornhill Magazine_, started the year before by
Smith and Elder. Ruskin had already contributed to it a paper on "Sir
Joshua and Holbein," a stray chapter from Vol. V., "Modern Painters."
His reputation as a writer and philanthropist, together with the
friendliness of editor and publisher, secured the insertion of the first
three,--from August to October. The editor then wrote to say that they
were so unanimously condemned and disliked, that, with all apologies, he
could only admit one more. The series was brought hastily to a
conclusion in November: and the author, beaten back as he had never been
beaten before, dropped the subject, and "sulked," s