implanting the serious element in Ruskin's character and life, and in
familiarizing him with the Bible, whose noble English, in King James'
version, manifestly entered early into the youth's ardent, prophetic
soul, and, as a writer, had much to do in forming his magnificent prose
style. Ruskin was in early years--indeed, far on in his manhood--in
delicate health, and consequently he was educated privately till he
passed to Christ Church College, Oxford, where, at the age of twenty, he
won the Newdigate prize for verse, and graduated in 1842. His taste for
art was manifested at an early age, and after passing from the
university he studied painting under J.D. Harding and Copley Fielding;
but his masters, as he tells us in "Praeterita," were Rubens and
Rembrandt.

At the outset of his career Ruskin, as is well known, was led to take up
a defence of J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) and the contemporary school of
English landscape-painting against the foreign trammels, which had
fastened themselves upon modern art, and especially to prove the
superiority of modern landscape-painters over the old masters. This
revolutionary opinion, though at first it was hotly contested,
established the new critic's position as a writer on art, and the
defence, or exposition rather, grew into the famous work called "Modern
Painters" (5 vols., 1843-60). This elaborate work deals with general
aesthetic principles, and, notwithstanding its occasional extravagances,
alike of praise and censure, its charm is irresistible, presenting us
with its brilliant and original author's ideas of beauty, to which he
freshly and powerfully awakened the world, while enshrining throughout
the work the most enchanting word-poems on mountain, leaf, cloud, and
sea, which, it is not too much to say, will live forever in English
literature. In the second volume Mr. Ruskin takes up the Italian
painters, and discusses at length the merits of their respective