t
spare, stooping figure, the rough-hewn, kindly face, with its mobile,
sensitive mouth, and clear deep eyes, so sweet and honest in repose, so
keen and earnest and eloquent in debate!"

When the fifth and last volume of "Modern Painters" was finally off his
hands, Mr. Ruskin not only engaged, as we have seen, in occasional
lecturing, but began (1861) to add a prolific series of
_brochures_--many of them with quaint but significant titles--to his
already stupendous mass of writing. Their subjects were not alone
aesthetics, but now treated of ethical, social, and political questions,
the prophetic declarations and earnest appeals of a man of wide and
varied culture, deep thought, and large experience. The attempted
alliance of political economy with art was a novel undertaking in that
sixth lustrum of the past century, even by a man of Mr. Ruskin's
eminence and fame in the world of letters. But Mr. Ruskin was a bold and
earnest man, as well as a genius; and he had too much to tell his
heedless, _laissez-faire_ age to keep silent on themes, remote as they
were from those he had hitherto taught, and of which he desired to
deliver his soul, whatever ridicule it might provoke and however adverse
the criticism levelled against him. His humanity and moral sense were
outraged by the manner in which the mass of his countrymen lived, and
trenchant was his castigation of this and eager as well as righteous his
desire to amend their condition and elevate and inspire their minds. As
an economist, it is true, there was not a little that was false as well
as eccentric in what he preached; moreover, much of his counsel was
directly socialistic in its trend, repugnant in large degree to his
English readers and hearers; but all this was atoned for by the honesty
and philanthropy of his motives, by his phenomenal fervor and eloquence,
and by the literary beauty and charm of every page he wrote.
Nevertheless, as in Carlyle--for in these depreciations the style of the
seer of Chelsea was deeply upon him--the note of calamity and the wail
of despair are too much in evidence in Ruskin's writings at this period,
while, like Carlyle also, he was equally precipitate and impulsive in
his attacks on things as they were. Yet in the economic condition just
then of England, and in the circumstances environing the labor world,
there was, possibly, justification for the rebukes and objurgations of
onlookers of the type of both of these men, and very hu