The popular feeling, won by the zeal and intrepidity of the first volume of _Modern Painters_, was no doubt a little tried by the graver discussions of the second. It was soon, however, to be again caught, and pleased by a bold and agreeable miscellany under the magical name of "The Seven Lamps;" and these Seven Lamps could hardly fail to throw some portion of their pleasant and bewildering light over a certain rudimentary treatise upon building, which was to appear under the title of "The Stones of Venice." We cannot, however, congratulate Mr Ruskin on the manner in which he has acquitted himself in this arena of philosophical inquiry, nor on the sort of theory of the Beautiful which he has contrived to construct. The least metaphysical of our readers is aware that there is a controversy of long standing upon this subject, between two different schools of philosophy. With the one the beautiful is described as a great "idea" of the reason, or an intellectual intuition, or a simple intuitive perception; different expressions are made use of, but all imply that it is a great primary feeling, or sentiment, or idea of the human mind, and as incapable of further analysis as the idea of space, or the simplest of our sensations. The rival school of theorists maintain, on the contrary, that no sentiment yields more readily to analysis; and that the beautiful, except in those rare cases where the whole charm lies in one sensation, as in that of colour, is a complex sentiment. They describe it as a pleasure resulting from the presence of the visible object, but of which the visible object is only in part the immediate cause. Of a great portion of the pleasure it is merely the vehicle; and they say that blended reminiscences, gathered from every sense, and every human affection, from the softness of touch of an infant's finger to the highest contemplations of a devotional spirit, have contributed, in their turn, to this delightful sentiment. Mr Ruskin was not bound to belong to either of these schools of philosophy; he was at liberty to construct an eclectic system of his own;--and he has done so. We shall take the precaution, in so delicate a matter, of quoting Mr Ruskin's own words for the exposition of his own theory. Meanwhile, as some clue to the reader, we may venture to say that he agrees with the first of these schools in adopting a primary intuitive sentiment of the beautiful; but then this primary intuition is only of a sensational or "animal" nature--a subordinate species of the beautiful, which is chiefly valuable as the necessary condition of the higher and truly beautiful; and this last he agrees with the opposite school in regarding as a derived sentiment--derived by contemplating the objects of external nature as types of the Divine attributes. This is a brief summary of the theory; for a fuller exposition we shall have recourse to his own words.