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Show JOHN Itl'SKIN DYING. A brief telegram from London announces an-nounces that John Kuskin is dying. He has for somo timo been more or less mentally unbalanced, and during the delirium of his present illness ho has twice attempted suicide. John Kuskin, who was born in 1810, is considered tho most eloquent and original of all writers upon art. He graduated at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1842. The first volume of .his "Modern Painters" appeared in the following year. ' The principal object of this work was to prove the superiority of modern landscape painters to the old masters, but in the following four volumes vol-umes Mr. Ruskin entered into a vast discursive treatise on the principles of art, interspersed with artistio and symbolical descriptions descrip-tions of nature, more elaborate and imaginative than any writer, prose or poetic, had ever before attempted. Although Al-though this work was essentially revolutionary revo-lutionary in its spirit and aim, and naturally na-turally excited the aversion and hostility hostil-ity of the conservatives in art, the un-equaled un-equaled splendor of its stylo gave it a place in literature. Crowds of admirers admir-ers and disciples sprang npj the views of art enunciated by Ruskin gradually mado way, and have largely determined tho course and character of later English Eng-lish art. -In 1M8 appeared "The Seven Lamps of Architecture," which was followed fol-lowed during the years 1851-53 by "The Stones of Venice," both being efforts to introduco a new and loftier conception concep-tion of the significance of domestic architecture. ar-chitecture. Those works were exquisitely exquis-itely illustrated by the author himself. About this time pro-raphtelitisra began to develop itself as a distinctive phase of modern art, and Kuskin warmly espoused its cause. In 1854 Mr. Ruskin published four singularly pithy and ingenious in-genious "Lectures on Architecture and Painting," aud in 1858 two "Lectures on the Political Economy of Art." These wore followed from time to time by numerous works bearing on art, sculpture, architecture, political economy, and so on. He has boon a very prolllic writer on these subjects, and his works have given him a high rank in literature. For ten years, from 1800 to 1870, he was Slade professor of line arts at Oxford. In 1871 he gave $25,000 to endow a mastor of drawing in the Taylor galleries gal-leries at that college. In the same year tho university of Cambridge conferred upon him the degree of LL. D. During the last few years of bis life Mr. Ruskin has been known as a great growler and cynic. In a lettor to the Pall Mall Gazette Ga-zette on the province of universities, he says: "The university's business in any country in Europe is to teach its youths as much Latin, Greek, mathematics and ast.-nomy as they can quietly learn in tho 'lino they're at it and nothiugolse. If ihcy don't learn their own language at home they can't learn it at a university. univer-sity. If they want to learn Chiueso, they should go to China and if they want to learn Dutch, to Amsterdam; and after they've learned all they want, loam wholesomely to hold their tongues, except on extreme occasions, in all languages whatsoever." |