contemporary school of
English landscape-painting against the foreign trammels, which had
fastened themselves upon modern art, and especially to prove the
superiority of modern landscape-painters over the old masters. This
revolutionary opinion, though at first it was hotly contested,
established the new critic's position as a writer on art, and the
defence, or exposition rather, grew into the famous work called "Modern
Painters" (5 vols., 1843-60). This elaborate work deals with general
aesthetic principles, and, notwithstanding its occasional extravagances,
alike of praise and censure, its charm is irresistible, presenting us
with its brilliant and original author's ideas of beauty, to which he
freshly and powerfully awakened the world, while enshrining throughout
the work the most enchanting word-poems on mountain, leaf, cloud, and
sea, which, it is not too much to say, will live forever in English
literature. In the second volume Mr. Ruskin takes up the Italian
painters, and discusses at length the merits of their respective
schools; in the others, as well as in the work as a whole, we have a
body of principles which should govern high art-work, as well as new
ideas as to what should constitute the equipment of the painter, and
that not only as regards the technique of his art, but in the effect to
be produced on the onlooker in viewing the skilled work of one who,
above all accomplishments, should be lovingly and intimately in contact
with nature.

From the study of painting Mr. Ruskin passed for a time to that of
architecture. In this department we have from his pen "The Seven Lamps
of Architecture" (1849) and "The Stones of Venice" (1851-53). In these
two complementary works their author sets forth as in an impressive
sermon the new and admonitory lesson that architecture is the exponent
of the national characteristics of a people,--the higher and nobler sort
exemplifying the religious life and moral virtue in a nation, the
debased variety, on the other hand, expressing the ignoble qualities of
national vice and shame. The text of "The Stones" is Venice, and the
design of the volumes, in the author's words, is to show that the Gothic
architecture of Venice "had arisen out of, and indicated, a state of
pure domestic faith and national virtue;" while its renaissance
architecture "had arisen out of and indicated a state of concealed
national infidelity and domestic corruption." The earlier work, "The
Seven Lamps,"