JOHN RUSKIN
Ruskin's death, as we all agreed, deprived us of the one man of letters who had a right to burial in Westminster Abbey. We may rejoice that his representatives preferred Coniston. The quiet churchyard in a still unpolluted country was certainly more appropriate for him than the 'central roar' of what he somewhere calls 'loathsome London.' But the general consent marks the fact that Ruskin had come to be recognised as a compeer of the greatest writers of the age. By many he is also revered as one who did more than almost any contemporary to rouse the sluggish British mind from its habitual slumber. His career, indeed, suggests many regrets. His later writings are too often a cry of despair and vexation of spirit. The world is out of joint, and all his efforts to set it right have failed. To those who cannot quite agree that we are all driving post-haste to the devil, the pessimism may seem
