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Show RUSKIN AS A CRITIC. When Mr. E. T. Cook was assistant editor on the Pall Mall Gazette, he brought out a "Pall Mall Extra," suggested by Sir John Lubbock's list of the best one hundred books. Mr. Steady in the January Success, reproduced this, and also a letter let-ter written by Mr. Ruskln to whom a copy was sent for criticism. Of the hundred names of books Mr. Ruskin scratched out somo lightly, some he blotted utterly and accepted a few. The letter he returned with the corrected list is, in many respects, a daisy. Some of the books he declared were "needless," some others "poisonous and rubbish." rub-bish." He stamped upon Grote's History of Greece, declaring that "there is not a commercial commer-cial establishment between Charing Cross and the Bank whose head clerk could not write a better one if he had the vanity to waste his time on it." He struck out "The Confessions of St. Augustine," Augus-tine," and gave as a reason: "Because religious people nearly always think too much about themselves, them-selves, and there are many saints whom it Is much more desirable to know the history of St. Patrick to begin with especially in modern times." He stamped upon John Stuart Mill and declared de-clared that "Sir John Lubbock ought to have known that his day is ovor." He had no use for Southey, Longfellow, Macauley, Thackeray and many others. He was especially bitter on Kings-ley, Kings-ley, and declared that "Hypatia is the most ghostly story in Christian tradition and should have been forever left in silence." He shook Darwin to shreds in this form: Because it is every man's duty to know what he is and not to think of the embryo he was or the skeleton he should be and because, too, Darwin Dar-win has a moral fascination for all vainly curious and idly speculative persons, and has collected In the train of him every impudent imbecility in Europe, like a dim comet wagging its useless bill of phosphorescent nothing across the steadfast stars." Let some one who imagines himself a writer try to improve on the last thirty words of the above. He had a special disdain for Gibbon, Insisting that, "primarily, none but the malignant and the weak study the decline and fall of either state or organism," and then adds: "For the rest, Gibbon is the worst English ever written by an educated Englishman. Having no imagination and little logic he is alike incapable either of picturesque-ness picturesque-ness or wit; his epithets are malicious without point, sonorous without weight and have no office of-fice but to make a flat sentence turgid." He handled Voltaire this way: "His work is, in comparison with good literature, what nitric acid is to wine, and sulphuretted hydrogen to air. Literary chemists cannot but take account of the sting and stench of him, but he has no place In the library of a thoughtful scholar." If anyone thinks Ruskin had no right to be a jH critic, or did not understand the meaning and jH proper emphasis of words, let him re-read his in- 'A troduction to "The Lamp of Memory," as follows: iH "Among the hours of his life to which the (a writer looks back with peculiar gratitude, as hav- "1 fng been marked by more than ordinary fullness i of joy or clearness of teaching, is one passed, now some years ago, near time of sunset, among H the broken masses of pine forest which skirt the ( course of the Ain above the village of Cham- ' pagnole, in the Jura. M It is a spot which has all the solemnity, with M none of the savageness of the Alps; where there M is a sense of great power manifested in the earth, ' M and of deep and majestic concord In the rise of 1 the long, low lines of piny hills; the first utter- il ance of those mighty mountain symphonies, soon ) to be more loudly lifted and wildly broken along the battlements of the Alps. rl But their strength is as yet restrained; the far-reaching ridges of pastoral mountains sue- IH ceed each other like the long and sighing swell ( which moves over quiet waters from some far-off )! stormy sea." Surely there was a rhythm in the soul of John H Ruskin. A century hence the world's scholars will H catch all that rhythm and hold him as a world's H wonder. H |