attempting to establish; and link him up with Kingsley and the rest.

Ruskin may be very roughly regarded as the young lieutenant of Carlyle
in his war on Utilitarian Radicalism: but as an individual he presents
many and curious divergences. In the matter of style, he enriched
English without disordering it. And in the matter of religion (which
was the key of this age as of every other) he did not, like Carlyle, set
up the romance of the great Puritans as a rival to the romance of the
Catholic Church. Rather he set up and worshipped all the arts and
trophies of the Catholic Church as a rival to the Church itself. None
need dispute that he held a perfectly tenable position if he chose to
associate early Florentine art with a Christianity still comparatively
pure, and such sensualities as the Renaissance bred with the corruption
of a Papacy. But this does not alter, as a merely artistic fact, the
strange air of ill-ease and irritation with which Ruskin seems to tear
down the gargoyles of Amiens or the marbles of Venice, as things of
which Europe is not worthy; and take them away with him to a really
careful museum, situated dangerously near Clapham. Many of the great men
of that generation, indeed, had a sort of divided mind; an ethical
headache which was literally a "splitting headache"; for there was a
schism in the sympathies. When these men looked at some historic
object, like the Catholic Church or the French Revolution, they did not
know whether they loved or hated it most. Carlyle's two eyes were out of
focus, as one may say, when he looked at democracy: he had one eye on
Valmy and the other on Sedan. In the same way, Ruskin had a strong right
hand that wrote of the great mediæval minsters in tall harmonies and
traceries as splendid as their own; and also, so to speak, a weak and
feverish left hand that was always fidgeting and trying to take the pen
away--and write an evangelical tract about the immorality of foreigners.
Many of their contemporaries were the same. The sea of Tennyson's mind