learned Pope by heart long before. Reading the Bible constantly, too, under his mother's direction, he knew well the majesty and simplicity of language, in the grand poetry of the Hebrew nation. He refers very often to this early familiarity with the Bible as one great source of the incomparable beauty of his literary style, and it was doubtless one of its formative elements.

The mother who insisted so strenuously upon this part of his education was a woman of somewhat severe character, who brought him up in complete isolation from all other children, and with none of the toys or amusements of an ordinary childhood. He says in relation to it:

"I had a bunch of keys to play with as long as I was capable only of pleasure in what glittered and jingled; as I grew older I had a cart and ball, and when I was five or six years old two boxes of wooden bricks. With these modest but, I still think, entirely sufficient possessions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon attained serene and secure methods of life and motion, and could pass my days contentedly in tracing the square, and comparing the colors of my carpet, examining the knots in the wood of the floors, or counting the bricks in the opposite houses, with rapturous intervals of excitement during the filling of the water-cart, or the still more admirable proceedings of the turncock when he turned and turned till a fountain sprang up in the middle of the street. But the carpet and what patterns I could find in the bed-covers, dresses, or wall-papers to be examined, were my chief resources."

The artist was embryonic even in the little child, as can be seen by this, and that the poet was also

in the soul was shown by his early delight in such glimpses of nature as came to him in his early

childhood.

He was once taken to Derwentwater, and he tells of the intense joy, mingled with awe, that he had in looking through the hollows in the mossy roots, over the crag into the dark lake, and which has associated itself more or less with all twining roots of trees ever since. He never lived in the country in childhood, and every small excursion was a most intense delight. He remembers the first time he ever walked on the grass, as other children remember some important occurrence, and every such new introduction to nature was to him a revelation.

His parents occasionally made a journey in their own coach, and these ecstatic periods still linger in his memory. He visited with them many of the

famous castles and cathedrals of his native land, and began that study of architecture which has occupied so much of the leisure of his life. He took the greatest interest and pleasure in it from the first, gaining much, no doubt, from the companionship of a man of taste and experience like the elder Ruskin.

John was also taken abroad while quite young by his parents, visited Switzerland and Italy, and learned. to revel in the joys of nature and art. He continued the observation of architecture begun among the cathedrals of England, and saw for the first time the incomparable splendor of ancient art. He was already a keen and a minute observer, and came home with many drawings, made with little skill, perhaps, but much truth. His first thought was to be a

painter, and he pursued the study of art with much diligence for several years.

We come now to the beginning of his life-work in the "Modern Painters." The first volume was the expansion of a magazine article, affirming that Turner, who had been harshly criticised by leading artists and critics, was right and true, and that his critics were wrong, base, and false. At that time, though he had been several times in Italy, he delighted chiefly in Northern art, beginning when a boy with Rubens and Rembrandt, and going on from them to Turner, who became the idol of a lifetime. The first volume involved him in so much discussion and drew forth such scathing criticism, that he found himself in for a battle, and went at once to Italy to prepare himself more fully.

The result of his study there was a reaction against Rubens, and great delight in Angelo and Raphael. The second volume, like the first, was chiefly written to defend Turner; but Turner had already passed the zenith of his power, and lay ill at Chelsea, embittered by the harsh and unjust criticism of the day, and hardly just even to the man who was endeavoring to do him honor. After his death Ruskin felt no need for haste, and took ten years for the thorough and critical study of art before beginning his work again. Most books would have been forgotten by that time, but the "Modern Painters" was far from being so in the circle it had so stirred, and the third and fourth volumes were received with a new storm of remonstrance and even of defiance. Ruskin contended that it was as ridiculous for any one to speak positively about painting who had not given a great part