ing his love for old Gothic architecture. Succeeding these were Lectures on Architecture and Painting, 1854; and pamphlets on Drawing and Perspective, on The Construction of Sheep-Folds,' on Pre-Raphaelitism, on The Exhibitions of the Royal Academy, on The Opening of the Crystal Palace. He has also written a series of papers in the Cornhill, upon The Relations of Employers and Employed? under the title Unto this Last. His latest works are- -Ethics of the Dust, and Sesame and Lilies, 1855 and 1856. In 1861 he made a Selection from his writings; and I know of no volume more full of beauty, interest, and instruction. It should be in every household.

TYRE, VENICE, AND ENGLAND.

Since first the dominion of men was asserted over the ocean, three thrones, of mark beyond all others, have been set upon its sands, the thrones of Tyre, Venice, and England. Of the first of these great powers only the memory remains; of the second, the ruin; the third, which inherits their greatness, if it forget their example, may be led through prouder eminence to less pitied destruction.

The exaltation, the sin, and the punishment of Tyre have been recorded for us, in perhaps the most touching words ever uttered by the prophets of Israel against the cities of the stranger. But we read them as a lovely song, and close our ear to the sternness of their warning; for the very depth of the fall of Tyre has blinded us to its reality, and we forget, as we watch the bleaching of the rocks between the sunshine and the sea, that they were once, "as in Eden, the garden of God." Her successor, like her in perfection of beauty, though less in endurance of dominion, is still left for our beholding in the final period of her decline: a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak, so quiet, so bereft of all but

fancy and rich poetic description; abounding in eloquent musing and impassioned declamation, in admirable delineations of the ancient glory and hopeless ruin, of the historic associations and pictorial wealth, of Venice."English Cyclopædia.

By which he means the Discipline of the Church

2 Travelling of late into the less flowery fields of Political Economy, he has lost his way, and has written things (papers in the Cornhill, chiefly) which are not likely to add to his fame as a writer, or his character as a man of common sense."-COLLIER. Says the Christian Examiner, New York, November, [ 1865,- We have been in years past among the warmest of Mr. Ruskin's admirers; and, so long as he was content to be simply a writer upon Art and a critic of artists, no one could be more ready than we to acknowledge the wonderful vigor and eloquence of his writings, the purity of his taste, and the courage and power with which he attacked vulgarity and pretence in all their forms. But, in an evil hour, Mr. Ruskin conceived the notion that he might become a political

1

economist; he who, among all English men of letters, is, beyond doubt, the one most entirely governed by the impulse and passion of the moment, deliberately abandoned the field in which, by common consent, he had gained the first position, to enter upon the discussion of those questions which, more than all others, demand the cool judgment, the patient and passionless reflection, and the life-long preparatory study, which only men precisely his opposite in temperament and mental babit can give. We might adopt his own language, and say, 'Such a change is not merely a Fall, it is a Catastrophe.""

3 Ten Lectures to Little Housewives."

4 This consists of two Lectures-first, of Kings' Treasures; second, of Queens' Gardens: by the former he means the treasures of knowledge stored in well-chosen libraries, to the doors of which he would say, Sesame, “open;" and in the latter he considers the position and influence of women, and the influence they should have in the household, in society, and in the world, and the education which would best fit them for their duties.

her loveliness, that we might well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the city and which the shadow.

TRUTH.

There are some faults slight in the sight of love, some errors slight in the estimation of wisdom; but truth forgives no insult and endures no stain. We do not enough consider this, nor enough dread the slight and continual occasions of offence against her. We are too much in the habit of looking at falsehood in its darkest associations and through the color of its worst purposes. That indignation which we profess to feel at deceit absolute, is indeed only at deceit malicious. We resent calumny, hypocrisy, and treachery because they harm us, not because they are untrue. Take the detraction and the mischief from the untruth, and we are little offended by it; turn it into praise, and we may be pleased with it. And yet it is not calumny nor treachery that does the largest sum of mischief in the world: they are continually crushed, and are felt only in being conquered. But it is the glistening and softly-spoken lie, the amiable fallacy, the patriotic lie of the historian, the provident lie of the politician, the zealous lie of the partisan, the merciful lie of the friend, and the careless lie of each man to himself, that cast that black mystery over humanity, through which any man who pierces, we thank as we would thank one who dug a well in a desert; happy in that the thirst for truth remains with us, even when we have wilfully left the fountains of it.

GOD'S REWARDS, GREAT REWARDS.

While the first-fruits of his possessions were required from the Israelite as a testimony of fidelity, the payment of those firstfruits was nevertheless rewarded, and that connectedly and specifically, by the increase of those possessions. Wealth, and length of days, and peace, were the promised and experienced rewards of his offering, though they were not the objects of it. The tithe paid into the storehouse was the express condition of the blessing which there should not be room enough to receive. And it will be thus always: God never forgets any work or labor of love; and whatever it may be of which the first and best portions or powers have been presented to Him, he will multiply and increase sevenfold.

THE FIELDS.

Consider what we owe merely to the meadow grass, to the covering of the dark ground by that glorious enamel, by the companies of those soft and countless and peaceful spears. The

fields! Follow but forth for a little time the thoughts of all that we ought to recognize in those words. All spring and summer is in them, the walks by silent, scented paths,-the rests in noonday heat, the joy of herds and flocks,-the power of all shepherd life and meditation,-the life of sunlight upon the world, falling in emerald streaks, and falling in soft blue shadows, where else it would have struck upon the dark mould or scorching dust, -pastures beside the pacing brooks,-soft banks and knolls of lowly hills,-thymy slopes of down overlooked by the blue line of lifted sea,-crisp lawns all dim with early dew, or smooth in evening warmth of barred sunshine, dinted by happy feet, and softening in their fall the sound of loving voices:—all these are summed in those simple words; and these are not all. We may not measure to the full the depth of this heavenly gift, in our own land; though still, as we think of it longer, the infinite of that meadow sweetness, Shakspeare's peculiar joy, would open on us more and more, yet we have it but in part. Go out, in the spring-time, among the meadows that slope from the shores of the Swiss lakes to the roots of their lower mountains. There, mingled with the taller gentians and the white narcissus, the grass grows deep and free; and, as you follow the winding mountain-paths, beneath arching boughs all veiled and dim with blossom,-paths that forever droop and rise over the green banks and mounds sweep-| ing down, in scented undulation, steep to the blue water, studded here and there with new-mown heaps, filling all the air with fainter sweetness,-look up towards the higher hills, where the waves of everlasting green roll silently into their long inlets among the shadows of the pines; and we may, perhaps, at last know the meaning of those quiet words of the one-hundred-andforty seventh Psalm,-"He maketh grass to grow upon the mountains."

There are also several lessons symbolically connected with this subject, which we must not allow to escape us. Observe, the peculiar characters of the grass which adapt it especially for the service of man are its apparent humility and cheerfulness:-its humility, in that it seems created only for lowest service,-appointed to be trodden on and fed upon; its cheerfulness, in that it seems to exult under all kinds of violence and suffering. You roll it, and it is stronger the next day; you mow it, and it multiplies its shoots, as if it were grateful; you tread upon it, and it only sends up richer perfume. Spring comes, and it rejoices with all the earth,-glowing with variegated flame of flowers, waving in soft depth of fruitful strength. Winter comes; and, though it will not mock its fellow-plants by growing then, it will not pine and mourn, and turn colorless or leafless as they. It is always green; and it is only the brighter and gayer for the hoar-frost.

THE SKY.

It is a strange thing how little in general people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which Nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works; and it is just the part in which we least attend to her. There is not a moment of any day of our lives when nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain it is all done for us and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And every man, wherever placed, however far from other sources of interest or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly. The noblest scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by few: it is not intended that man should live always in the midst of them; he injures them by his presence, he ceases to feel them if he be always with them. But the sky is for all: bright as it is, it is not "too bright nor good for human nature's daily food;" it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart, for the soothing and purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together, almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us is as distinct as its ministry of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal is essential. And yet we never attend to it, we never make it a subject of thought; but, as it has to do with our animal sensations, we look upon all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon all which bears witness to the intention of the Supreme, that we are to receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew which we share with the weed and the worm, only as a succession of meaningless and monotonous accidents, too common and too vain to be worthy of a moment of watchfulness or a glance of admiration. If in our moments of utter idleness and insipidity we turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its phenomena do we speak of? One says it has been wet, and another, it has been windy, and another, it has been warm. Who among the whole chattering crowd can tell me of the forms and the precipices of the chain of tall white mountains that girded the horizon at noon yesterday? Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of the south, and smote upon their summits until they melted and mouldered away into a dust of blue rain? Who saw the dance of the dead clouds when the sunlight left them last night, and the west wind blew them before it like withered leaves? All has passed, unregretted as unseen; or, if the apathy be ever shaken off, even for an instant, it is only by

what is gross or what is extraordinary. And yet it is not in the broad and fierce manifestations of the elemental energies, not in the clash of the hail nor the drift of the whirlwind, that the highest characters of the sublime are developed. God is not in the earthquake nor in the fire, but in the still small voice. They are but the blind and the low faculties of our nature, which can only be addressed through lampblack and lightning. It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty,—the deep and the calm and the perpetual,-that which must be sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is understood,―things which the angels work out for us daily, and yet vary eternally, which are never wanting and never repeated, which are to be found always, yet each one found but once ;-it is through these that the lesson of devotion is chiefly taught, and the blessing of beauty given.

INTERPRETATION OF THE TERM "GENTLEMAN.”

Two great errors, coloring, or, rather, discoloring, severally, the minds of the higher and lower classes, have sown wide dissension and wider misfortune through the society of modern days. These errors are in our modes of interpreting the word “gentleman.”

Its primal, literal, and perpetual meaning is, "a man of pure race," well bred, in the sense that a horse or dog is well bred.

The so-called higher classes, being generally of purer race than the lower, have retained the true idea and the convictions associated with it, but are afraid to speak it out, and equivocate about it in public; this equivocation mainly proceeding from their desire to connect another meaning with it, and a false one,-that of "a man living in idleness on other people's labor,”—with which idea the term has nothing whatever to do.

The lower classes, denying vigorously, and with reason, the notion that a gentleman means an idler, and rightly feeling that the more any one works the more of a gentleman he becomes and is likely to become, have nevertheless got little of the good they otherwise might from the truth, because with it they wanted to hold a falsehood,—namely, that race was of no consequence: it being precisely of as much consequence in man as in any other animal.

The nation cannot truly prosper till both these errors are finally got quit of. Gentlemen have to learn that it is no part of their duty or privilege to live on other people's toil. They have to learn that there is no degradation in the hardest manual or the humblest servile labor when it is honest; but that there is degradation, and that deep, in extravagance, in bribery, in indolence, in pride, in taking places they are not fit for, or in coining places for which there is no need. It does not disgrace a gentleman to become an errand-boy or a day-laborer, but it disgraces