graduates who heard those famous lectures, who followed his master, when, armed with pick and shovel, he himself led the way to mend the Hincksey road, he gives a vivid picture of the generous enthusiasm with which the youth of Oxford was fired. If Mr. Ruskin could not make the men draw he would at least make them dig. Not a few of those who went with him to the Hincksey diggings have, we rejoice to think, lived to do good work, whether they belong to the company of St. George or have laboured in other directions. No true disciple of mine will ever be a Ruskinian, he will follow, not me, but the instincts of his own soul and the guidance of its Creator' (St. Mark's Rest). Mr. Collingwood also insists with great truth and force on the value of the five courses of lectures delivered by Mr. Ruskin, during the first three years of his professorship. These courses, published separately as Lectures on Art, Aratra Pentilici, The Eagle's Nest, Ariadne Florentina, and Val d'Arno contain his mature views and theories of art, and are full of valuable and suggestive thought. In their published form, they have attracted less attention than Modern Painters, but one, at least, of Ruskin's old admirers welcomed them warmly.

Many thanks to you for so pleasant and instructive a gift,' wrote Carlyle on receiving the volume of Val d'Arno. The work is full of beautiful and delicate perceptions, new ideas, both new and true, which throw a brilliant illumination over that important piece of history, and awake fresh curiosities and speculations on that and on other much wider subjects. It is all written with the old nobleness and fire, in which no other living voice to my knowledge equals yours. Perge, perge-and as the Irish say, "more power to your elbow" (ii. 143).

The course on 'Birds,' published in the charming volume of Love's Meinie, was delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1873, and repeated at Eton during the same year. The twelve lectures on Sir Joshua Reynolds belong to November 1875. During the interval Mr. Ruskin had been back to Florence and Rome, studying Botticelli with fresh interest, and copying the Zipporah of the Sistine frescoes. He also visited Assisi in June 1874, and fell dangerously ill there. During his illness, he dreamt that the monks had made him a brother of the Third Order of St. Francis, and in the next chapter of Fors, he owned how strongly he had been tempted to imitate the example of St. Francis, and become a devout follower of holy poverty. But he remembered his duties to his Oxford pupils, and came back to lecture to them on the Florentine School, and to talk to the Eton boys about Botticelli. Morn

ings in Florence was the result of this journey as, a few years' later, the Guide to the Pictures in the Academy at Venice and St. Mark's Rest were the fruit of another visit to Venice. But repeated attacks of illness interrupted his Oxford work, and, at the end of his third term of three years, Mr. Ruskin felt it his duty to resign the Slade Professorship. A few months before he had written his last Fors, and struggled to prepare a catalogue for the exhibition of his Turner drawings at the Fine Art Gallery in Bond Street. The pathetic words with which he concluded his description of Turner's youthful picture of the Coniston Fells, are still fresh in our minds:

'Morning breaks, as I write, along these Coniston Fells, and the level mists, motionless and grey beneath the rose of the moorlands, veil the lower woods, and the sleeping village, and the long lawns by the lake shore. Oh! that some one had but told me, in my youth, when all my heart seemed to be set on these colours and clouds, that appear for a little while and then vanish away, how little my love of them would serve me, when the silence of lawn and wood in the dews of morning should be completed, and all my thoughts should be of those whom, by neither, I was to meet more (ii. 180).

A week later the exhibition opened, and Mr. Ruskin was struck down by a sudden and dangerous attack of inflammation of the brain. He remained in a critical state during some weeks, and his recovery was hailed with a burst of widespread sympathy, and the gift of Turner's drawing of the 'Splügen,' which a number of his friends bought for the sum of a thousand guineas, and presented to him. The next three years were spent in retirement at Brantwood, the house on Coniston Water, which he had bought from Mr. W. J. Linton, after a serious illness at Matlock in 1871. Mr. Collingwood gives us a pleasant picture of his life there, with its refined surroundings, its manifold interests and activities, its mountain-walks and boating expeditions. His humbler neighbours soon learnt by experience the genuine interest which he took in their well-being; and this sense of mutual regard has more than once found expression in the words, 'Eh! he's a grand chap, is Maisther Rooskin!' In August 1880 he visited his old haunts in France and wrote a new book, The Bible of Amiens,' which was to be to the Seven Lamps what St. Mark's Rest was to The Stones of Venice' (ii. 207). On his return, he lectured on the same subject to his old friends, the Eton boys. One noteworthy thing about this new work was its distinctly religious tone. He had come out of the phase of doubt through which he had passed, and henceforth owned the fear

of God and the revelation of the Divine Spirit as the groundwork of civilization and the guide of progress' (ii. 207). He wrote a series of letters on the Lord's Prayer for the Furness Clerical Society, in which he dwelt on the need of a living faith in the Fatherhood of God and childlike obedience to His laws; and he spoke touchingly to the Coniston children, when they sang the hymn 'Jesu, here from sin deliver,' of the love of God and of the need we all have of a Saviour, to deliver us from our sins. In 1882 he went abroad again, and after seeing Mont Blanc once more, crossed the Mont Cenis into Italy. At Florence he was introduced to Miss Alexander, whose drawings and intimate knowledge of the Tuscan peasants alike delighted him, and whose Story of Ida and Roadside Songs of Tuscany, he afterwards edited. In 1883 he was once more elected Slade Professor, and delivered two admirable courses of lectures on The Art and The Pleasures of England. But the tendencies of the modern scientific party distressed his sensitive nature, and when the vote was passed to establish a physiological laboratory at the museum, he resigned his professorship and left Oxford in the bitterness of his soul. The next four years (1885-1889) were devoted to Præterita, which he wrote with the help of old journals and scattered notes. Two volumes had already appeared and he was at work on a third, which was to bring this account of his life down to the year 1875, when, in the summer of 1889, his brain-power suddenly failed, and the task had to be abandoned. He had previously suffered from frequent attacks of the same illness, and it was just before one of these, that he wrote the famous reply to an appeal for a subscription to pay off a debt on a chapel at Richmond. The language is certainly vehement, but 'through the violence of the wording,' as Mr. Collingwood remarks, we see 'a perfectly consistent and reasonable expression of Mr. Ruskin's views.'

'Brantwood, May 19th, 1886.

'SIR, I am scornfully amused at your appeal to me, of all people in the world the precisely least likely to give you a farthing! My first word to all men and boys who care to hear me is, "Don't get into debt. Starve and go to heaven-but don't borrow. Try first begging. I don't mind, if its really needful, stealing! But don't buy things you can't pay for! And of all manner of debtors, pious people building churches they can't pay for, are the most detestable nonsense to me. Can't you preach and pray behind the hedges --or in a sand-pit-or a coal-hole first? And of all manner of churches thus idiotically built, iron churches are the damnablest to me. And of all the sects of believers in any ruling spirit-Hindoos, Turks, Feather Idolaters, and Mumbo Jumbo, Log and Fire-wor

shippers who want churches, your modern English Evangelical sect is the most absurd and entirely objectionable and unendurable to me! All which they might very easily have found out from my books-any other sort of sect would-before bothering me to write it to them. Ever, nevertheless, and in all this saying, your faithful servant, John Ruskin." The recipient of the letter promptly sold it for ten pounds' (ii. 241).

During the last two years, we are glad to learn, Mr. Ruskin's health has steadily improved. Although aged and feeble, he is himself again, in all but the power of resuming his literary work. He leads a peaceful life at Brantwood, where he takes daily walks along the lake, is able to enjoy books and music, and in the company of one or two intimate friends, can still talk as brightly as of old.

6

'For now the storm-cloud has drifted away, and there is light in the west, a mellow light of evening-time, such as Turner painted in his pensive Epilogue. Datur Hora Quieti,' there is more work to do, but not to-day. The plough stands in the furrow, and the labourer passes peacefully from his toil, homewards' (ii. 255).

ART. X.-THE TERCENTENARY' LITERATURE OF THE CONGREGATIONAL UNION.

1. Early Independents. (London, 1893.)

2. The Story of the English Separatists. By ALEXANDER MACKENNAL, B.A., D.D. (London, 1893.)

THE leading articles in which some of our most widely circulated newspapers pretended to explain to their readers, or imagined that they explained to them, the history and meaning of the 'Tercentenary of the Congregationalist Martyrs' were a disgrace to our English press. It is only fair to say that they had the outward decency of stupidity-they were not stained with the foulmouthedness and brutality of the Marprelate press or of John Penry. Their offence lay in the fact that not one of these blind leaders of the blind, who assume such infallibility and omniscience, had thought it any part of his duty to inform his own mind about the subjects upon which he undertook to lay down the law to his readers. It is not too much to say that no little local newspaper in Germany or Switzerland would have dared for very shame to publish upon any historical or biographical subject such ignorant and uncritical articles, so deficient in wholesome

scepticism, so servile to unexamined traditions, as appeared in the Daily Chronicle, the Westminster Gazette, the Echo, the Pall Mall Gazette, the Speaker, and in some other journals which do not openly profess to be organs of Separatism. The newspapers, in spite of their old declamations against 'taxes on knowledge,' which was their somewhat pharisaic circumlocution for the limitation of their own commercial profits, are 'run' for dividends or for political party; hence it would be as unreasonable to expect them to care supremely for truth and science as it is to expect them not to suppress 'news' which they think ought to remain unknown. The socalled 'Liberal' newspapers have to care for the Dissenting vote as well as for trade profits, and consequently dare not publish anything, even in the shape of history or biography, which is likely to irritate the intolerant 'Nonconformist conscience.'

It must have been a marvel to every critical student of English history who chanced to see one of the amazing leading articles of our press upon Barrowe, Greenwood, and Penry, from what book or books the writers borrowed their matter. We think that the secret is now out. The newspaper professors of English history-who, as one of them ingenuously confessed, had never heard until quite lately even the very names of 'the three martyrs'-must have received from the Congregational Union early copies of its slovenly and ignorant Tendenzschriften, so as to guide their steps into the way of legend.

The two volumes have been produced under the general editorship of the Rev. Dr. A. Mackennal, who seems to be regarded by his colleagues as their full man.' He is the Scottish minister of an Independent chapel in the North of England, and exhibits all the incapacity of his greater countrymen, David Hume and Thomas Carlyle, for understanding the most English of all English institutions, the Church, though he exhibits none of their severe and honourable zeal in research. He has furnished an imprimatur for volume i., the Early Independents, and provided the entire contents of volume ii., the Story of the English Separatists.

The first volume is a collection of six essays, which were originally published as separate tracts-'The Church in the Prison,' by Professor W. T. Adeney, M.A.; The Separatists in the Universities,' by C. Silvester Horne, M.A.; Penry, the Welsh Independent,' by H. Elvet Lewis; 'John Robinson,' by J. Guinness Rogers, B.A.; 'The Pilgrim Fathers,' by C. Ray Palmer, D.D.; and Congregationalism, Old and