[Sidenote: Triumph of the reformer over the art-critic.]

The complete triumph of the reformer over the art-critic is marked by
_Fors Clavigera_, a series of letters to workingmen, begun New Year's
Day, 1871, in which it was proposed to establish a model colony of
peasants, whose lives should be made simple, honest, happy, and even
cultured, by a return to more primitive methods of tilling the soil
and of making useful and beautiful objects. The Guild of St. George,
established to "slay the dragon of industrialism," to dispose of
machinery, slums, and discontent, consumed a large part of Ruskin's
time and money. He had inherited a fortune of approximately a million
dollars, and he now began to dispose of it in various charitable
schemes,--establishing tea-shops, supporting young painters, planning
model tenements, but, above all, in elaborating his ideas for the
Guild. The result of it all--whatever particular reforms were effected
or manual industries established--was, to Ruskin's view, failure, and
his mind, weakening under the strain of its profound disappointments,
at last crashed in ruin.

[Sidenote: Death in 1900.]

It is needless to follow the broken author through the desolation
of his closing years to his death in 1900. Save for his charming
reminiscences, _Præterita_, his work was done; the long struggle was
over, the struggle of one man to reduce the complexities of a national
life to an apostolic simplicity, to make it beautiful and good,

Till the high God behold it from beyond,
And enter it.