If he had accomplished that, one might have found for him more respectable employment-to set the stars in better order, perhaps→→ (they seem grievously scattered as they are, and to be of all manner of shapes and sizes, except the ideal shapes and the proper size) or to give us a corrected view of the ocean: that, at least, seems a very irregular and improveable thing: the very fishermen do not know, this day, how far it will reach, driven up before the west wind: perhaps some one does, but that is not our business. Let us go down and stand by the beach of it-of the great irregular sea, and count whether the thunder of it is not out of time. One, two-here comes a well-formed wave at last, trembling a little at the top, but on the whole orderly. So, crash among the shingle, and up as far as the gray pebble: now stand by and watch! Another-ah, careless wave! why couldn't you have kept your crest on? It is all gone away into spray, striking up against the cliffs there. I thought as much missed the mark by a couple of feet! Another: how now, impatient one! couldn't you have waited till your friend's reflux was done with, instead of rolling yourself up with him in that unseemly manner? You go for nothing. A fourth and a goodly one at last. What think we of yonder slow rise and dry crystalline hollow without a flaw? Steady, good wave: not so fast; where are you coming to? By our architectural word, this is too bad: two yards over the mark, and eversomuch of you in our face besides; and a wave which we had some hope of, behind there, broken all to pieces out at sea, and laying a white table-cloth of foam all the way to the shore, as if the marine gods were to dine off it. Alas, for those unhappy arrow-shots of nature, she will never hit her mark with those unruly waves of hers, nor get one of them into the ideal shape, if we wait for her a thousand ycars" (pp. 341-342).

Were ever satire, eloquence, and truth more beautifully blended than in this passage! But in our eagerness to seize on this specimen of the author's powers we have overshot ourselves, and passed a gem which it is worth retracing our steps to reclaim. It is on the subject of ornament as viewed from different points of distance :

"It may be asked whether, in advocating this adaptation to the distance of the eye, I obeyed my adopted rule of observance of natural law. Are not all natural things, it may be asked, as lovely near as far away? Nay, not so. Look at the clouds and watch the delicate sculpture of their alabaster sides, and the rounded lustre of their magnificent rolling. They were meant to be beheld far away: they were shaped for their place high above your head: approach them, and they fuse into vague mists, or whirl away into fierce fragments of thundering vapour. Look at the crest of the Alp from the far-away plains, over which its light is cast, whence human souls have communion with it by their myriads. The child looks up to it in the dark, and the husbandman in the burden and heat of the day, and the old man in the going down of the sun, and it is to them all as the celestial city on the

world's horizon, dyed with the depth of heaven, and clothed with the calm of eternity. There it was set by holy dominion by Him who marked for the sun his journey, and bade the moon know her going down. It was built for its place in the far-off sky: approach it, and in the sound of the voice of man dies away about its foundation; and the tide of human life, shallowed upon the vast aerial shore, is at last met by the eternal, Here shall thy waves be stayed.' The glory of its aspect fades into blanched fearfulness; its purple walls are rent into grisly rocks; its silver fretwork saddened into wasting snow; the storm-brands of ages are on its breast; the ashes of its own ruin lie solemnly in its white raiment. Nor in such instances as these alone, though strangely enough, the discrepancy between apparent and actual beauty is greater in proportion to an unapproachableness of the object, is the law observed. For every distance from the eye there is a peculiar kind of beauty, or a different system, of lines of form; the sight of that beauty is reserved for that distance and that alone. If you approach nearer that kind of beauty is lost, and another succeeds, to be deorganized and reduced to strange and incomprehensible means and appliances in turn. If you desire to perceive the great harmonies of the form of a rocky mountain, you must not ascend upon its sides. All is then disorder and accident, or seems so: sudden starts of its shattered beds hither and thither: ugly struggles of unexpected strength from under the ground: fallen fragments, toppling one over another, into more helpless fall. Retire from it, and as your eye commands it more and more, as you see the ruined mountain world with a wider glance, behold!-dim sympathies begin to busy themselves in the disjointed mass; line binds itself into stealthy fellowship with line; group by group the helpless fragments gather themselves into ordered companies; new captains of hosts and masses of battalions become visible, one by one, and far-away answers of foot to foot, and of bone to bone, until the powerless chaos is seen risen up with girded loins, and not one piece of all the unregarded lump could now be spared from the mystic whole" (pp. 239-240).

If we here conclude our quotations it is because our limits warn us to desist, not that the volume does not abound with passages of equal splendour which we should win the gratitude of our readers by transferring to our pages. Regarding the book as a whole, and the most complete and elaborate treatise on the various points embraced which it has been our fortune to take up, it is impossible to overrate the service which its publication has rendered to architecture; and while many will regret the indiscriminate censure of whole schools of art, and the tone of contempt in which architects are spoken of, we cannot but feel that this uncompromising treatment of what is bad in art is the only mode in which abuses, upheld by so much talent and sanctioned by long usage, can be effectually denounced. Scorning to administer the wholesome medicine of reproof in the diluting menstruum of courtly phrase, Mr. Ruskin

VOL. XXX.-L

has spoken the bold truth, or what he conceives to be truth, without respect of persons, parties, or schools; and when a writer of earnest spirit and unquestioned powers deliberately repudiates all the edifices of a period regarded as the Augustan age of architecture, condemning such works as St, Paul's and Whitehall, people, unless blinded by prejudice or hopelessly enthralled by conventionalism, will begin to think there must be some grounds for his opinions, and this will lead them to investigate; and, if this be done in a candid and teachable spirit, we will venture to predict that many converts will be made to the theories propounded in the "Stones of Venice,"

The sweeping condemnation of the Palladian, Cinque-cento, or by whatever term the debased classical architecture of the renaissance may be known, is startling; and to include the edifices raised by Michael Angelo and Palladio, by Inigo Jones and Wren, in the unqualified proscription, is to pronounce a sentence of outlawry in the justice of which few will acquiesce, and we are not of the few. In Mr. Ruskin's censure of the "pestilent art of the renaissance," in so far as ornament is concerned, however, we cordially coneur, and the process of conviction is due to the conclusive arguments of the author on this point. We admit the immense inferiority of the Palladian to the Greco-Roman architecture from which it was derived; but it should be borne in mind that the application of classical architecture of Greek and Roman temples to dwelling-houses, where multitudes of rooms and successive stories involve of necessity numerous small parts, tends to that littleness of style which is one feature of degradation. The baseness of ornament and mechanical repetition of parts, which result in making a building simply an agglomeration of details multiplied without variation, cannot but be condemned as indicative of deadness of feeling, and degrading architecture to the level of a manufacture. The evidences of this deplorable condition of a noble art are too numerous and glaring in this country to admit of dispute.

While, however, Mr. Ruskin wields the hammer of Thor in demolishing the productions of a base system of architecture, he implants the germs of a fresh and beauteous growth of art. The manner in which the author has expressed himself, in the notes appended to his work, of the labours of Mr. Pugin, has given great offence in certain quarters; but, if free criticism on the productions of any living architect be allowable, exemption should, least of all, be claimed for one who is distinguished by his onslaughts on modern architecture with both pencil and pen. Mr. Ruskin asserts that Mr. Pugin is not a great

We

architect, but one of the smallest possible architects." fully agree in the negative part of the sentence, but we cannot subscribe to the affirmative clause of it. The author has been reproached by more than one of our contemporaries with indulging in personalities. This is not true: his war is with principles, not persons, and there is a wide distinction between the two a man may be everything that is virtuous and honourable, and, nevertheless, a very indifferent architect.

Another objection urged against the volume before us is, that it disparages all other architecture to the undue and invi dious exaltation of Venetian Gothic. True it is, he not only delights in it himself, and succeeds pretty extensively in making those who have not seen it or who, having seen it, have overlooked many of its noble characteristics in love with it, too, But we do not think that any unprejudiced reader of this the first volume of the "Stones of Venice" would fairly arrive at any other conclusion than this—that the author found, in this Venetian Gothie, features of construction and ornament worthy of being set forth as examples of what legitimate architecture could produce, and that he has not given it a prominence or importance to which it is not fully entitled; while, in his strictures on Greek architecture, and his ridicule of that servile yet puny imitation of triglyphs and gutta-which, by the way, owe their origin to the wooden temples that we see imitated on the Lycian marbles and the tombs of Asia Minor-he loosens the bonds of rules, precedents, and prejudices, which have enslaved and deadened the art of architecture, and has supplied the student with principles based on analogy with the works of nature.

The illustrations consist of smaller ones bound up with the book; and a series of larger plates published, as our heading denotes, in a separate form. It is impossible to speak in terms of too high panegyric of these beautiful specimens of Mr. Ruskin's graphic powers. The larger illustrations are especially bold, original, and effective. The first plate, "The Twentieth Capital of the Ducal Palace," is one of the most striking specimens of mezzotint engraving we ever saw; it is difficult to distinguish it from an Indian ink or Sepia drawing. "Arabian Windows in Campo Sta. Maria, Mater Domini," is equally wonderful in the same style, exhibiting great breadth and boldness of drawing, and a depth and richness of shadow, without the sacrifice of details, which are exquisitely given.

The

And here we take our leave of Mr. Ruskin, hoping soon to make his further acquaintance in the second volume of "The Stones of Venice;" or, if it so please him, in the long promised

third of "Modern Painters." Few if any writers on architecture bring to their work such extensive and varied knowledge -such profound and laborious research-such strength of conviction and earnestness of feeling, as the author of the "Stones of Venice" and the "Seven Lamps of Architecture." He has produced a revolution in art, and he will, if he have not already done so, effect the same in architecture.

We cannot conclude our notice of this remarkable volume without expressing--what it may be, for our memory is "indifferent good," we have said before with reference to the author-our delight in the contemplation of one with all the allurements to idleness and the profitless pleasures of fashionable life, which beset the path of a man in his known position, devoting his early and best energies to the illustration and advancement of art, and making all things subservient to the glory of God, dealing out his censures with severity chiefly on those who have mistranslated the works of the Great Artificer. It is well known that he is a young man, having numbered little more than thirty summers; but to a mind like his every season is a summer, and this may account for its ripe maturity. In all societies, whether of literature, art, or science, we hear his name mentioned with respect, not only by those from whom he differs, but by those whose works he has condemned; and we have before us a letter from an artist of no mean mark, who writes to us in somewhat homely phrase, He has blown me up; but he has spoken the truth, and I hope to profit by it: he is a glorious fellow!" The only disparaging remark that was ever made to us, with reference to the author, was from the lips of a Scotch publisher, who observed to us, "The chiel has a bee in his bonnet;" to which we replied, "We only wished that we had such a bee in our own."

ART. VIII.-The Prose and Poetical Works of John Milton; with an Introductory Review. By ROBERT FLETCHER. London: Henry G. Bohn.

A CHARACTERISTIC of the present times is the increased and increasing cheapness of all those products of manual or mental skill which form a portion of modern civilization. We are led to make this remark by the volume purchasable for less than a pound, and containing more than a thousand closely printed pages, which stands at the head of our notice of our greates writer. In the time of Elizabeth the number of printers, be