brush and the pen; and involves
literally, as the Attorney-General himself hinted, the absolute
"raison d'etre" of the critic. The cry, on their part, of "Il faut
vivre," I most certainly meet, in this case, with the appropriate
answer, "Je n'en vois pas la necessite."

Far from me, at that stage of things, to go further into this
discussion than I did, when, cross-examined by Sir John Holker,
I contented myself with the general answer, "that one might admit
criticism when emanating from a man who had passed his whole life in
the science which he attacks." The position of Mr. Ruskin as an art
authority we left quite unassailed during the trial. To have said that
Mr. Ruskin's pose among intelligent men, as other than a _litterateur_
is false and ridiculous, would have been an invitation to the stake;
and to be burnt alive, or stoned before the verdict, was not what I
came into court for.

Over and over again did the Attorney-General cry out aloud, in the
agony of his cause, "What is to become of painting if the critics
withhold their lash?"

As well might he ask what is to become of mathematics under similar
circumstances, were they possible. I maintain that two and two the
mathematician would continue to make four, in spite of the whine of
the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five. We are told
that Mr. Ruskin has devoted his long life to art, and as a result--is
"Slade Professor" at Oxford. In the same sentence, we have thus his
position and its worth. It suffices not, Messieurs! a life passed
among pictures makes not a painter--else the policeman in the National
Gallery might assert himself. As well allege that he who lives in a
library must needs die a poet. Let not Mr. Ruskin flatter himself
that more education makes the difference between himself and the
policeman when both stand gazing in the Gallery.

There they might remain till the end of time; the one decently silent,
the other saying, in good English, many high-sounding empty things,
like the cracking of thorns under a pot--undismayed by the presence of
the Masters with whose names he is sacrilegiously familiar; whose
intentions he interprets, whose vices he discovers with the facility
of the incapable, and whose virtues he descants upon with a verbosity
and flow of language that would, could he hear it, give Titian the
same shock of surprise that was Balaam's, when the first great critic
proffered his opinion.

This one instance apart, w