“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 done.  He has poured out a torrent of words, some right, some wrong, but such as have raised the level of art into a new world, which have adorned English literature for centuries, and have inspired the English race for generations; he has cast his bread upon the waste and muddy waters with a lavish hand, and has not waited to find it again, though it has been the seed of abundant harvest to others.”

Again, speaking of what Ruskin sought to accomplish in the regeneration of modern society, and the reformation of our social ideals, and of that “heroic piece of Quixotism” he founded, “the Guild of St. George,” Mr. Harrison remarks:—­

“The first life of John Ruskin was the life of a consummate teacher of art and master of style; the second life was the life of priest and evangelist....  Here is the greatest living master [the passage was written while Mr. Ruskin was yet alive] of the English tongue, one of the most splendid lights of our noble literature, one to whom a dozen paths of ambition and power lay open, who had everything that could be offered by genius, fame, wealth, social popularity, and intense sensitiveness to all lovely things—­and