By such pilgrimages, but more easily through the post, the new work filtered out, in monthly instalments, to a limited number of buyers.  After three years the price was raised to tenpence.  In 1875 the first thousands of the earlier numbers were sold:  “the public has a very long nose,” Mr. Ruskin once said, “and scents out what it wants, sooner or later.”  A second edition was issued, bound up into yearly volumes, of which eight were ultimately completed.  Meanwhile the work went on, something in the style of the old Addison Spectator; each part containing twenty pages, more or less, by Ruskin, with added contributions from various correspondents.

The charm of “Fors” is neither in epigram nor in anecdote, but in the sustained vivacity that runs through the texture of the work; the reappearance of golden threads of thought, glittering in new figures, and among new colours; and throughout all the variety of subject a unity of style unlike the style of his earlier works, where flowery rhetorical passages are tagged to less interesting chapters, separately studied sermonettes interposed among the geology, and Johnson, Locke, Hooker, Carlyle—­or whoever happened to be the author he was reading at the time—­frankly imitated.  It was always clever, but often artificial; like the composition of a Renaissance painter who inserts his bel corpo ignudo to catch the eye.  In “Fors,” however, the web is of a piece, all sparkling with the same life; though as it is gradually unwound from the loom it is hard to judge the design.  That can only be done when it is reviewed as a whole.

At the time, his mingling of jest and earnest was misunderstood even by friends.  The author learnt too painfully the danger of seeming to trifle with cherished beliefs.  He forswore levity, but soon relapsed into the old style, out of sheer sincerity:  for he was too much in earnest not to be frankly himself in his utterances, without writing up to, or down to, any other person’s standard.

Ruskin did not wish to lead a colony or to head a revolution.  He had been pondering for fifteen years the cause of poverty and crime, and the conviction had grown upon him that modern commercialism was at the root of it all.  But his attacks on commercialism—­his analysis of its bad influence on all sections of society—­were too vigorous and uncompromising for the newspaper editors who received “Fors,” and even for most of his private friends.  There were, however, some who saw what he was aiming at:  and let it be remarked that his first encouragement came from the highest quarters.  Just as Sydney Smith, the chief critic of earlier days, had been the first to praise “Modern Painters,” in the teeth of vulgar opinion, so now Carlyle spoke for “Fors.”

“5, Cheyne Row, Chelsea, April 30th, 1871.

“Dear Ruskin,