of his readers. He is exultingly smiting the Philistine hip and thigh with a certain complacency; and the good time is coming in which Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites will be duly honoured. The fervid rhetoric is the natural language of one who is leading a band of followers to the promised land. Something gradually changed; not his character, but his habitual tone of feeling. In his natural temper, he tells us, he had most sympathy with Marmontel;[1] in his 'enforced and accidental temper,' with Swift. If any one asks how Swift was soured, there is no want of sufficient explanation. We cannot say of Ruskin that he ever became 'soured': the genial and generous qualities which suggest the comparison to Marmontel were always there; but, certainly, his 'enforced and accidental temper' became only too like Swift's. The modern Englishman was, for him, painfully like the Yahoo. A man hardly becomes a pessimist out of simple logic, and Ruskin had personal sorrows and sufferings, and an exquisitely sensitive and affectionate nature. The intellectual change was,
- ↑ So Mill tells us in his Autobiography that a passage in Marmontel's Memoirs gave him the first help in rousing him from his youthful fit of melancholy.
