JOHN RUSKIN.
Born 1819.
the age of twenty, Mr. Ruskin, then at
Christ Church, Oxford, had just won the Newdigate prize poem. Two years later the first volume of "Modern
Painters" showed that a new poet had indeed arisen, though a poet who was destined not to cast his thoughts in verse, but in "the other harmony of prose." At eight-and-thirty "Stones of Venice" had appeared. At eight-and-forty (as in our second portrait) he had recently been elected Rede Lecturer at Cambridge, and was in the height of his great combat with the world he lives in a world which, in his eyes, is given up almost beyond redemption to canters, money-grubbers, inventors of improved machinery, and every kind of charlatan. In volume after volume, he was putting forth—in the midst of much which reason found fantastic—bursts of satire
fierce as Juvenal's, and word-pictures more gorgeous than the tints of Turner, conveyed in that inimitable style which is as strong and sweet as Shelley's verse. In these latter days (as our last portrait shows him) Mr. Ruskin, like a prophet in a hermitage, has become more and more of a recluse, though now and then his voice is still audible in a wrathful letter to the papers, like a voice heard crying in the wilderness that all is lost.
