Ruskin loved the religious spirit of the mediaeval builders, Byzantine, Lombard, or Gothic; and the pure and holy faith of the early sacred painters like Fra Angelico, Orcagna, and Perugino.  He thought that whatever was greatest even in Raphael, Leonardo, and Michelangelo came from their training in the old religious school, not from the new science of the Renaissance.  “Raphael painted best when he knew least.”  He deplored the harm to Catholic and Protestant alike of the bitter dissensions of the Reformation.  But he sorrowfully acknowledged the corruption of the ancient Church, and had no respect for modern Romanism.  Against the opinion that Gothic architecture was fitted exclusively for ecclesiastical uses, he strongly protested.  On the contrary, he advised its reintroduction, especially in domestic building.  “Most readers . . . abandon themselves drowsily to the impression that Gothic is a peculiarly ecclesiastical style. . . .  The High Church and Romanist parties . . . have willingly promulgated the theory that, because all the good architecture that is now left is expressive of High Church or Romanist doctrines, all good architecture ever has been and must be so—­a piece of absurdity. . . .  Wherever Christian Church architecture has been good and lovely, it has been merely the perfect development of the common dwelling-house architecture of the period. . . .  The churches were not separated by any change of style from the buildings round them, as they are now, but were merely more finished and full examples of a universal style. . . .  Because the Gothic and Byzantine styles are fit for churches, they are not therefore less fit for dwellings.  They are in the highest sense fit and good for both, nor were they ever brought to perfection except when they were used for both.” [30]

The influence of Walter Scott upon Ruskin is noteworthy.  As a child he read the Bible on Sundays and the Waverley Novels on week-days, and he could not recall the time when either had been unknown to him.  The freshness of his pleasure in the first sight of the frescoes of the Campo Santo he describes by saying that it was like having three new Scott novels.[31] Ruskin called himself a “king’s man,” a “violent illiberal,” and a “Tory of the old-fashioned school, the school of Walter Scott.”  Like Scott, he was proof against the religious temptations of mediaevalism.  “Although twelfth-century psalters are lovely and right,” he was not converted to Catholic teachings by his admiration for the art of the great ages; and writes, with a touch of contempt, of those who are “piped into a new creed by the squeak of an organ pipe.”  If Scott was unclassical, Ruskin was anti-classical.  The former would learn no Greek; and the latter complained that Oxford taught him all the Latin and Greek that he would learn, but did not teach him that fritillaries grew in Iffley meadow.[32] Even that fondness for costume which has been made a reproach against Scott