In the next two lectures he spoke of the two great forms of Play, the great Games of Money-making and War.  He had been invited to lecture at Bradford, in the hope that he would give some useful advice towards the design of a new Exchange which was to be built; in curious forgetfulness, it would appear, of his work during the past ten years and more.  Indeed, the picture he drew them of an ideal “Temple to the Goddess of Getting-on” was as daring a sermon as ever prophet preached.  But when he came to tell them that the employers of labour might be true captains and kings, the leaders and the helpers of their fellow-men, and that the function of commerce was not to prey upon society but to provide for it, there were many of his hearers whose hearts told them that he was right, and whose lives have shown, in some measure, that he did not speak in vain.

Still stranger, to hearers who had not noted the conclusion of his third volume of “Modern Painters,” was his view of war, in the address to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, in December 1865.  The common view of war as destroyer of arts and enemy of morality, the easy acceptance of the doctrine that peace is an unqualified blessing, the obvious evils of battle and rapine and the waste of resources and life throughout so many ages, have blinded less clear-sighted and less widely-experienced thinkers to another side of the teaching of history, which Ruskin dwelt upon with unexpected emphasis.

But modern war, horrible, not from its scale, but from the spirit in which the upper classes set the lower to fight like gladiators in the arena, he denounced; and called upon the women of England, with whom, he said, the real power of life and death lay, to mend it into some semblance of antique chivalry, or to end it in the name of religion and humanity.

In the New Review for March 1892, there appeared a series of “Letters of John Ruskin to his Secretary,” which, as the anonymous contributor remarked, illustrate “Ruskin the worker, as he acts away from the eyes of the world; Ruskin the epistolographer, when the eventuality of the printing-press is not for the moment before him Ruskin the good Samaritan, ever gentle and open-handed when true need and a good cause make appeal to his tender heart; Ruskin the employer, considerate, generous—­an ideal master.”

Charles Augustus Howell became known to Ruskin (in 1864 or 1865) through the circle of the Pre-Raphaelites; and, as the editor of the letters puts it, “by his talents and assiduity” became the too-trusted friend and protege of Ruskin, Rossetti and others of their acquaintance.  It was he who proposed and carried out the exhumation, reluctantly consented to, of Rossetti’s manuscript poems from his wife’s grave, in October, 1869; for which curious service to literature let him have the thanks of posterity.  But he was hardly the man to carry out Ruskin’s secret charities, and long before he had lost Rossetti’s confidence[12] he had ceased to act as Ruskin’s secretary.