Frederic Harrison; London and New York: Macmillan & Co. 1900.]

"The influence of Ruskin," says Mr. Harrison, "has been part of the
great romantic, historical, catholic, and poetic revival of which
Scott, Carlyle, Coleridge, Freeman, Newman, and Tennyson in our own
country have been leading spirits within the last two generations in
England. There is no need to compare him with any one of these as a
source of original intellectual force. He owns Scott and Carlyle as his
masters, and he might vehemently repudiate certain of the others
altogether. His work has been to put this romantic, historical, and
genuine sympathy inspired by Scott, Wordsworth, and Carlyle into a new
understanding of the arts of form. The philosophic impulse assuredly was
not his own. It is a compound of Scott, Carlyle, Dante, and the Bible.
The compound is strange, for it makes him talk sometimes like a Puritan
father, and sometimes like a Cistercian monk. At times he talks as Flora
MacIvor talked to young Waverley; at other times like Thomas Carlyle
inditing a Latter-day Pamphlet. But to transfuse into this modern
generation of Englishmen this romantic, catholic, historical, and social
sympathy as applied to the arts of form, needed gifts that neither
Scott, nor Carlyle, nor Newman, nor Tennyson possessed--the eye, if not
the hand, of a consummate landscape painter, a torrent of ready
eloquence on every imaginable topic, a fierce and desperate courage that
feared neither man nor devil, neither failure nor ridicule, and above
all things an exquisite tenderness that is akin to St. Francis or St.
Vincent de Paul....

"Here is a man who, laboring for fifty years, has scattered broadcast a
thousand fine ideas to all who practise the arts, and all who care for
art. He has roused in the cultured world an interest in things of art
such as a legion of painters and ten royal academies could never have