which is still unspent, and of an energy which age cannot destroy. And one other there is, a mighty prophet in his day, who has laid down his sword and shield, and withdrawn himself from the din and tumult of the camp. In his home on the heights above Coniston Water, Mr. Ruskin is spending a calm and tranquil old age. For him the heat and burden of the day are over, and the repose of evening has been well earned. But in his peaceful retreat on that lovely shore he is not forgotten. His presence seems to cast a blessed influence over all that mountain region, and the thoughts of his countrymen go out to him in love and reverence. His name has become a household word in English homes; thousands of workers through the breadth and length of the land remember him with grateful affection as they go out to their daily toil. Many and great are the services which he has rendered the men and women of this generation. He has opened their eyes to the beauty of common things; to the splendour of the grass which grows upon the mountain-side; to the perfect shape of the swallow that skims the summer air. He has told them the wonderful meanings which lie hidden in the sculptured stones of Venice or the storied marbles of the Shepherd's Tower. More than this, in an age when the struggle of life is fierce, and the pressing claims of things present are apt to make us lose sight of higher and diviner aims, Mr. Ruskin has never ceased to call us to a life of high and holy faith in God and active love to man. He has lifted up his voice boldly to rebuke the idlers and the pleasureseekers, and to remind us that man does not live by bread alone. The greatness of a nation,' he has often said, 'must be measured not alone by its wealth and apparent power, but by the degree in which its people have learned together in the great world of books, of art, and of nature, pure and ennobling joys.' Wherever the English language is spoken his books are read. His words have borne their message to other realms, and in the furthest climes his name is honoured to-day by every honest seeker after truth. Count Leo Tolstoi, the well-known Russian philanthropist, told an Englishman the other day that he thought Ruskin one of the greatest men of the age, and that if all Englishmen did not agree with him in this, it was because no man is a prophet in his own country. But there is no doubt, he added, that future ages will do him justice. The practice of writing biographies of distinguished persons during their lifetime is growing every day more common. It may not commend itself to our old-fashioned ideas, and it is attended with some obvious drawbacks; but whether for good or evil, the custom has become general. Mr. Collingwood, who has given us a life of Ruskin in two handsome volumes, illustrated with portraits of his hero at different stages of his life, has more to say in defence of his action than most biographers of living celebrities. A whole literature, as he remarks, has already grown up around Mr. Ruskin's name. Studies of Ruskin's life and work, epitomes of his art-teaching, accounts of the many public institutions which he has founded or helped, have been published in a score of different magazines. His position as an art critic has been savagely attacked and vigorously defended. His theories and schemes of social reform have been the object of much friendly criti-cism, and not a little good-tempered ridicule. Miss Thackeray has devoted a charming chapter to her recollections of her father's friend, and Mr. Ruskin himself has, in his Præterita, given us the most delightful autobiography of his youth. We can only hope, in common with all those who have enjoyed those vivid and original pages, that he may yet live once again to take up his pen and give us some more of those recollections which bring the scenes of past days and their actors before us in a way that nothing else can ever do. But since at his age and in his declining health, we fear this must remain uncertain, we welcome this biography, written by one who has long enjoyed Mr. Ruskin's confidence, and that of his nearest friends and relations, as the best substitute that we can have for a continuation of Præterita. Mr. Collingwood, it is well known, has acted in the capacity of private secretary to Mr. Ruskin for many years. He has lived with him at Brantwood, and has been liberally supplied with material for his present work by himself and his friends. Miss Prout, the daughter of the artist, has contributed her reminiscences of young Ruskin in his early days at Denmark Hill. Both Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Severn, who have during many years made their home with Mr. Ruskin, have given the author the benefit of their help and advice. Mr. Severn has adorned the book with a lovely drawing of Brantwood and Coniston Water, as well as sketches of Mr. Ruskin's former homes at Denmark Hill and Herne Hill, while Mrs. Severn has not only lent several of her cousin's drawings, including an admirable likeness of the great man by his own hand, a sketch of rare interest and value, but has herself revised the proofs of the whole work, making several important additions and corrections; so that the present Life comes to us with the highest sanction and authority. Mr. Collingwood does not pretend to give us an exhaustive criticism of Mr. Ruskin's teaching either in art or ethics. His work is of a purely biographical character, and the chief events of Mr. Ruskin's life are set down in proper order from his birth until the present day. We have a full account of his journeys, of his studies, of his books, his lectures; of all the strange variety of schemes which have engrossed his time and thoughts in turn. And we have, too, many of Mr. Ruskin's own letters, as well as several from Carlyle, from Robert Browning and his wife, and other friends, which are now published for the first time. A full and accurate chronological table, a bibliography of Mr. Ruskin's writings, and a catalogue of his drawings are added at the end of each volume, and greatly increase the interest and usefulness of the work. John Ruskin was born at his father's house in Bloomsbury-54 Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, on February 8, 1819. Both his parents were of Scottish birth. His father, the son of an Edinburgh tradesman, came to seek his fortunes in London as a boy, and worked his way upwards until, about 1809, he entered into partnership with a Spanish sherry merchant, Mr. Peter Domecq, the owner of large vineyards at Macharnudo, in Spain. Ruskin contributed the brains, Domecq the sherry, and a third partner, Mr. Henry Telford, the capital necessary for the undertaking. The business prospered under the management of the shrewd and energetic young Scotchman, who conducted the correspondence, travelled for orders, and directed the Spanish growers himself. By degrees he made a considerable fortune, paid off the debts of his less prosperous father, and after nine years of work and waiting, married his cousin, Margaret Cox, and settled in a house in Bloomsbury. Mr. Ruskin, who was the only child of this excellent couple, has himself made us familiar with the virtues and the peculiarities, the habits and the beliefs, of both his parents. We know them both intimately the father, 'that entirely honest man,' going daily backwards and forwards to his office, yet relieving his business cares by his love of books and pictures, regarded in the light of a household god at home-the mother, passionately devoted to her child, but unflinching in her stern Puritan rule, making little John learn whole chapters of the Bible by heart at a sitting, allowing him a single currant when he came to dessert, and rigidly putting away all toys, even the Punch and Judy dressed in scarlet and gold, which a kind aunt brought him from the Soho Bazaar. Peace, obedience, and faith, and the habit of fixed attention were, Mr. Ruskin considers, the chief advantages of this early training. Its defects were its formalism and hardness. 'I had nothing to love,' he writes in Præterita; 'my parents were, in a sort, visible powers of nature to me, no more loved than the sun and moon.' Happily for the lonely child, born in the heart of London, he was from the first familiar with country sights and sounds. His early summers were spent at Hampstead and Dulwich. At three years old he went to Scotland and there first saw the mountains which have been the true love of his life. When on his return his portrait was painted by Northcote, the artist asked him what background he would like, the child answered without moment's hesitation, 'Blue hills.' The next year his parents moved to a house on Herne Hill, surrounded by green fields and spacious gardens that were an Eden for the little boy'all the more,' Mr. Collingwood suggests, that the fruit of it was forbidden' (i. 18). Here John Ruskin's youth was spent. Here the first volume of Modern Painters was composed, and here, on May 10, 1886, he wrote the preface to Præterita. 'I write these few prefatory words on my father's birthday, in what was once my nursery in his old house-to which he brought my mother and me, sixty-two years since, I being then four years old... I have written frankly, garrulously, and at ease; speaking of what it gives me joy to remember, at any length I like-sometimes very carefully of what I think it may be useful for others to know; and passing in total silence things which I have no pleasure in reviewing' (pp. v, vii). Ruskin père still travelled for the business, and every spring, generally on May 10, the birthday observed with the solemnity of a religious festival, the family set out in their carriage and journeyed by easy stages to the North, calling at towns and great country seats in turn, and seeing churches and castles, lakes and mountains, in their intervals of leisure. The English lakes, and Scotland, Wales, and Paris were all visited in this manner. These summer tours were events of great importance in the boy Ruskin's life. He has told us how full of wonder and delight the world seemed to him as, sitting propped up by his own little trunk, between his parents, in the postchaise, he looked out through the glass windows at the country on either side. How tenderly he recalls the days when he rambled with his nurse among the steep rocks and gnarled trunks of Friar's Crag, or gleaned the ripe corn in the harvest-fields on Tay side with his Scotch cousins. 'I hesitate in recording, as a constant truth for the world, the impression left on me, when I went gleaning with Jessie, that Scottish sheaves are more golden than are found in other lands, and that no harvests, elsewhere visible to human eyes, are so like the "corn of heaven," as those of Strath-Tay and Strath-Earn.' 1 He had But this wise child was not content with seeing. already begun to describe what he saw on his travels; to write down, on his return to the hotel in the evening, what he had seen in the day. The sight of Skiddaw and of Snowdon inspired him with a burst of song. His journals became poems, and when he was just fourteen he poured out his love for the 'blue hills,' and for those very Coniston Crags where day by day he still sees the morning break, in the following lines: 'I weary for the fountain foaming, For shady holm and hill; My mind is on the mountain roaming, The crags are lone on Coniston And Glaramara's dell, And dreary on the mighty one, The cloud-enwreathed Scafell. Oh! what although the crags be stern, There is a thrill of strange delight A present of Roger's Italy, illustrated with Turner's vignettes, on his birthday that year, first inspired him with admiration for this painter, and a few weeks later the pleasure which both he and his father took in Prout's Sketches in Flanders and Germany made his mother suggest a tour on the Continent. So, the day after his father's birthday, the whole family set off, travelling in good old-fashioned style, with four horses and postilions, maid-servants, and courier. They worked slowly through Flanders and up the Rhine, never in a hurry, finding good horses and pleasant rooms everywhere, and people who took off their hats to them when they arrived and departed. When they reached Schaffhausen they took a walk one Sunday evening, and there, standing on a garden terrace, John Ruskin caught his first sight of the Alps. 1 Præterita i. 108. |