easier than to bring the ordinary critic under the head of the
criminal classes. But let us leave such an inartistic subject and return
to beautiful and comely things, remembering that the art which would
represent the spirit of modern newspapers would be exactly the art which
you and I want to avoid--grotesque art, malice mocking you from every
gateway, slander sneering at you from every corner.

Perhaps you may be surprised at my talking of labour and the workman. You
have heard of me, I fear, through the medium of your somewhat imaginative
newspapers as, if not a 'Japanese young man,' at least a young man to
whom the rush and clamour and reality of the modern world were
distasteful, and whose greatest difficulty in life was the difficulty of
living up to the level of his blue china--a paradox from which England
has not yet recovered.

Well, let me tell you how it first came to me at all to create an
artistic movement in England, a movement to show the rich what beautiful
things they might enjoy and the poor what beautiful things they might
create.

One summer afternoon in Oxford--'that sweet city with her dreaming
spires,' lovely as Venice in its splendour, noble in its learning as
Rome, down the long High Street that winds from tower to tower, past
silent cloister and stately gateway, till it reaches that long, grey
seven-arched bridge which Saint Mary used to guard (used to, I say,
because they are now pulling it down to build a tramway and a light cast-
iron bridge in its place, desecrating the loveliest city in
England)--well, we were coming down the street--a troop of young men,
some of them like myself only nineteen, going to river or tennis-court or
cricket-field--when Ruskin going up to lecture in cap and gown met us. He
seemed troubled and prayed us to go back with him to his lecture, which a
few of us did, and there he spoke to us not on art this time but on life,
saying that it seemed to him to be wrong that all the best physique and
strength of the young men in England should be spent aimlessly on cricket-
ground or river, without any result at all except that if one rowed well
one got a pewter-pot, and if one made a good score, a cane-handled bat.
He thought, he said, that we should be working at something that would do
good to other people, at something by which we might show that in all
labour there was something noble. Well, we were a good deal moved, and
said we would do anything he wished. So