the attempt was the payment of 'ransom.' The quiet and comfort of the house and grounds at Denmark Hill became intolerable to him from the thought of the misery of London. In 1871 his mother died, and the house was given up. Miss Agnew married Mr. Arthur Severn, and they lived in the old Ruskin home on Herne Hill. Ruskin bought from William James Linton [q. v. Suppl.] a house on Coniston lake, overlooking the Old Man, called Brantwood. This was his home for the remainder of his life. For some years, however, he paid frequent visits to London, where he still mixed in congenial society. He was also a member of the Metaphysical Society. The enlargement of the house and grounds at Brantwood became one of his principal pleasures, but he could not enter into his peace without making some effort to cure what seemed to him the anarchy outside. He established first an organ for his propaganda. This was 'Fors Clavigera,' a monthly letter 'to the workmen and labourers of Great Britain.' It is one of the curiosities of literature. Its discursiveness, its garrulity, its petulance are amazing. On reading it one is not inclined to dispute what Ruskin somewhere says of himself, that he was 'an impetuous and weakly communicative person.' Some of the eccentricity of his monthly miscellany was due to the gradual approach of a morbid irritability of the brain. But 'Fors' is full of passionate intensity; it abounds in forcible writing, and the ingenuity with which innumerable threads are knit together to enforce the author's economic principles is remarkable. For his new organ Ruskin provided himself with a new publisher. He set up his old pupil, Mr. George Allen, in the trade, and established a system of net prices. At first no discount was allowed to the booksellers; they were expected to add their own percentage to the published price. After a few years this heroic policy was abolished. The sale of Ruskin's books rapidly grew, and for many years before his death yielded him on the average 4,000l. a year. In America the sale of his books in cheap pirated editions had for many years been very extensive. Ruskin's monthly organ was used to preach a crusade and to found a society. 'I will stand it no longer,' he cried in the opening number of 'Fors' (January 1871), and threw himself with characteristic enthusiasm and self-sacrifice into an attempt to found a Utopia in England. There was to be a guild of companions enrolled under the banner of St. George to make 'a merrie England.' Tithes were to be given, and Ruskin himself paid 7,000l—a tithe of his then remaining possessions—into a trust for the purposes of the guild. Sir Thomas Dyke Acland and Francis Cowper-Temple (afterwards Lord Mount-Temple) were the original trustees. In May 1871 the scheme was made public. In 'Fors' for that month Ruskin called on any landlords to come and help him 'who would like better to be served by men than by iron devils,' and any tenants and any workmen 'who could vow to work and live faithfully for the sake of the joy of their homes.' 'That food can only be got out of the ground and happiness out of honesty' were the first two principles which the guild of St. George was to demonstrate; the third was that 'the highest wisdom and the highest treasure need not be costly or exclusive' (Prince Leopold's speech on Ruskin). The establishment of these principles led to three corresponding experiments, of (1) an agricultural, (2) an industrial, and (3) an artistic character respectively. The agricultural experiments were not a brilliant success. Ruskin drew many charming pictures of his ideal settlements, but the realities did not correspond to them. Sometimes the land, sometimes the settlers, and sometimes both proved intractable. Ruskin reaped from St. George's Farms a plentiful crop of disappointments and grumbles. An exception may be made in favour of St. George's land at Barmouth, of which an attractive account by Blanche Atkinson has been published (1900).
Among industrial experiments which directly or indirectly owe their origin to Ruskin were the revival of the hand-made linen industry in Langdale, which under Mr. Albert Fleming—'master of the rural industries of Loughrigg'—gives employment to many of the peasants. Of a like nature was a cloth industry at Laxey, in the Isle of Man, established for Ruskin by Mr. Egbert Rydings; there are also one or two co-operative undertakings of a successful character which owe their inception to Ruskin's teaching (see Cook's 'Studies in Ruskin' and ' Ruskin and Modern Business' in the Spectator, 17 Feb. 1900).
The artistic branch of 'St. George's' work took shape in a museum at Sheffield. Originally established in 1875 in a cottage at Walkley with Henry Swan, a former pupil of Ruskin at the Working Men's College, as curator, the management of the museum was in 1890 taken over by the Sheffield corporation, and removed to an old hall in Meersbrook Park. Ruskin had for some years employed artists to sketch mediæval
