minds.  Ruskin as an art-critic—­how profoundly unfair, prejudiced, unjust he is!  He has made up his mind about the merit of an artist; he will lay down a principle about accuracy in art, and to what extent imagination may improve upon vision; and then he will abuse Claude for modifying a scene, in the same breath, and for the same reasons, with which he will praise Turner for exaggerating one.  He will use the same stick that he throws for one dog to fetch, to beat another dog that he dislikes.  Of course he says fine and suggestive things by the way, and he did a great work in inspiring people to look for beauty, though he misled many feeble spirits into substituting one convention for another.  I cannot read a page of his formal writings without anger and disgust.  Yet what a beautiful, pathetic, noble spirit he had!  The moment he writes, simply and tenderly, from his own harrowed heart, he becomes a dear and honoured friend.  In Praeterita, in his diaries and letters, in his familiar and unconsidered utterances, he is perfectly delightful, conscious of his own waywardness and whimsicality; but when he lectures and dictates, he is like a man blowing wild blasts upon a shrill trumpet.  Then Carlyle—­his big books, his great tawdry, smoky pictures of scenes, his loud and clumsy moralisations, his perpetual thrusting of himself into the foreground, like some obstreperous showman; he wearies and dizzies my brain with his raucous clamour, his uncouth convolutions.  I saw the other day a little Japanese picture of a boat in a stormy sea, the waves beating over it; three warriors in the boat lie prostrate and rigid with terror and misery.  Above, through a rent in the clouds, is visible an ugly grotesque figure, with a demoniacal leer on his face, beating upon a number of drums.  The picture is entitled “The Thunder-God beats his drums.”  Well, Carlyle seems to me like that; he has no pity for humanity, he only likes to add to its terrors and its bewilderment.  He preached silence and seclusion to men of activity, energy to men of contemplation.  He was furious, whatever humanity did, whether it slept or waked.  His message is the message of the booming gale, and the swollen cataract.  Yet in his diaries and letters, what splendid perception, what inimitable humour, what rugged emotion!  I declare that Carlyle’s thumbnail portraits of people and scenes are some of the most admirable things ever set down on paper.  I love and admire the old furious, disconsolate, selfish fellow with all my heart; though he was a bad husband, he was a true friend, for all his discordant cries and groans.  Then there is Rossetti—­a man who wrote a few incredibly beautiful poems, and in whom one seems to feel the inner fire and glow of art.  Yet many of his pictures are to me little but voluptuous and wicked dreams; and his later sonnets are full of poisonous fragrance—­poetry embroidered and scented, not poetry felt.  What a generous, royal prodigal nature he had, till he sank