At the outset of his career Ruskin, as is well known, was led to take up a defence of J.M.W.  Turner (1775-1851) and the contemporary school of English landscape-painting against the foreign trammels, which had fastened themselves upon modern art, and especially to prove the superiority of modern landscape-painters over the old masters.  This revolutionary opinion, though at first it was hotly contested, established the new critic’s position as a writer on art, and the defence, or exposition rather, grew into the famous work called “Modern Painters” (5 vols., 1843-60).  This elaborate work deals with general aesthetic principles, and, notwithstanding its occasional extravagances, alike of praise and censure, its charm is irresistible, presenting us with its brilliant and original author’s ideas of beauty, to which he freshly and powerfully awakened the world, while enshrining throughout the work the most enchanting word-poems on mountain, leaf, cloud, and sea, which, it is not too much to say, will live forever in English literature.  In the second volume Mr. Ruskin takes up the Italian painters, and discusses at length the merits of their respective schools; in the others, as well as in the work as a whole, we have a body of principles which should govern high art-work, as well as new ideas as to what should constitute the equipment of the painter, and that not only as regards the technique of his art, but in the effect to be produced on the onlooker in viewing the skilled work of one who, above all accomplishments, should be lovingly and intimately in contact with nature.

From the study of painting Mr. Ruskin passed for a time to that of architecture.  In this department we have from his pen “The Seven Lamps of Architecture” (1849) and “The Stones of Venice” (1851-53).  In these two complementary works their author sets forth as in an impressive sermon the new and admonitory lesson that architecture is the exponent of the national characteristics of a people,—­the higher and nobler sort exemplifying the religious life and moral virtue in a nation, the debased variety, on the other hand, expressing the ignoble qualities of national vice and shame.  The text of “The Stones” is Venice, and the design of the volumes, in the author’s words, is to show that the Gothic architecture of Venice “had arisen out of, and indicated, a state of pure domestic faith and national virtue;” while its renaissance architecture “had arisen out of and indicated a state of concealed national infidelity and domestic corruption.”  The earlier work, “The Seven Lamps,”—­the Lamp of Sacrifice, of Truth, Power, Beauty, Life, Memory, Obedience,—­looks upon architecture “as the revealing medium or lamp through which flame a people’s passions,—­the embodiment of their polity, life, history, and religious faith in temple and palace, mart and home.”  Akin to these two eloquent works, in which their author thoughtfully sets forth the civic virtues and moral tone, as well as the debased characteristics, by which architecture is produced at certain eras in a people’s life, is the earlier volume on “The Poetry of Architecture” (1837), which discusses the relation between architecture and its setting of landscape or other environment, illustrated by examples drawn from regions he had visited,—­the English Lakeland, France, Switzerland, Spain, and northern Italy.