the altar as the faithless one took upon herself new vows unto a new
husband. The estrangement and loss of a wife gave Ruskin afresh to
Art,--his true and fondly cherished bride.

At this period, as we know, English painting was at a low ebb, mediocre
and conventional, though with a show of artificial brilliance. Ruskin,
with his scorn of the artificial and scholastic, threw himself into the
work of overturning the established, complacent school of the time, and
with splendid enthusiasm and an unfailing belief in himself and his
ideas he undertook to reform what had been, and to raise current
conceptions of art to a more exalted and lofty plane. We have seen what
he had already achieved in his first dashing period of literary
activity, in the production of the early volumes of "Modern Painters,"
and in his "Seven Lamps" and "Stones of Venice." While he was at work on
the concluding volumes of the first and last of these great books there
arose in England the somewhat fantastic movement in art, launched by the
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which included such Ruskinites and other
devotees of early Christian and mediaeval painting as Rossetti, Millais,
Morris, Burne-Jones, and Holman Hunt. Towards this new school of
symbolists and affectationists Ruskin was not at first drawn, since it
seemed to him unduly idealistic, if not mystic, and smacked not a
little, as he thought, of popery. Later, however, he saw good in it, as
a breaking away from academic trammels; while he recognized the earnest
enthusiasm of the little band of artists and artist-poets, as well as
their technical dexterity and brilliance. With ready decision as well as
with his accustomed zeal for art, Ruskin ended by defending and
applauding the new innovators, particularly as their chief motive was
the one the master had always strenuously pled for,--adherence to the
simplicity of nature. Their scrupulous attention to detail,
characteristic of the Pre-Raphaelites, later on bore good results, even