this man, after thirty years of untiring labor, devotes himself to train, teach, delight, and inspire a band of young men, girls, workmen, children,—­all who choose to come around him.  He lavishes the whole of his fortune on them; he brings to their door his treasures of art, science, literature, and poetry; he founds and endows museums; he offers these costly and precious collections to the people; he wears out his life in teaching them the elements of art, the elements of manufacture, the elements of science; he shows workmen how to work, girls how to draw, to sing, to play; he gives up to them his wealth, his genius, his peace, his whole life.  He is not content with writing books in his study, with enjoying art at home or abroad; he must carry his message into the streets.  He gives himself up—­not to write beautiful thoughts:  he seeks to build up a beautiful world....  When I see this author of ‘Modern Painters’ and the ‘Stones of Venice,’ the man who has exhausted almost all that Europe contains of the beautiful, who has thought and spoken of almost every phase of human life, and has entered so deeply into the highest mysteries of the greatest poets—­when I see him surrounding himself in his old age with lads and lasses, schoolgirls and workmen, teaching them the elements of science and art, reading to them poems and tales, arranging for them games and holidays, ornaments and dresses, lavishing on these young people his genius and his wealth, his fame and his future—­I confess my memory goes back instinctively to a fresco I saw in Italy years ago—­was it Luini’s?—­wherein the Master sat in a crowd of children and forbade them to be removed, saying that ’of such is the kingdom of heaven.’”

With this generous tribute to and appreciation of Ruskin, despite the economic vagaries into which the great critic and teacher of his time fell, we may more confidently approach the busy era of his later and self-sacrificing labors, and with less apology take space to deal—­as compactly and intelligently as we can—­with some of the more notable of the many books and brochures of the period.  Difficult as would be the task, fortunately there is little need to epitomize these works, as many of them are better known, and perhaps more attentively read, than his earlier, bulkier, and more ambitious writings.  A few of them lie outside the economic gospel of their apostolic author, and these we will first and briefly deal with.  A number of them are instructive and inspiring lay sermons on the mystical union between nature and art, beauty and utility, and their reflex in the reverential homage for the beautiful and the worthy in the mind and character of the English-speaking race.  The whole form a great body of fine and thoughtful work, which is as enchaining as its meaning is often profound.  The best-known of these lay sermons is:  “The Queen of the Air” (1869), a splendid blending of his fancy with the Greek nature-myths of cloud and storm, represented by Athena, goddess of the heavens,