As he grew older, he grew dogmatic and crotchety in the extreme. He imitated Carlyle in his scoldings, and indeed was much influenced by Carlyle in many ways. He has always been an impracticable theorist, and in these latter years he has put forth a thousand foolish and subversive vagaries. People have not taken him quite seriously for some time. They laugh at his follies, ridicule his philanthropic schemes,--of which he has an infinite number, for he is a man of the kindest heart,--they tell excruciating stories of his colossal self-conceit, and they go home and read his books because no such books can be found written by any other man, search they never so widely. He has always been a wrong-headed man, entirely out of accord with the world around him, and consequently almost sure to be on the wrong side of every practical political question. He and Carlyle had much in common in all this, and it would have been a rich treat to have heard Ruskin proclaiming his political creed, "I am a King's man, and no mob's man;" and to have heard Carlyle answer with denunciations of his millions of fellow-countrymen, "mostly fools." Ruskin lives in one of the most beautiful of London suburbs,--on Denmark Hill, at the south side of the river, near Dulwich and the exquisite Sydenham slopes, where the Crystal Palace stands. His home is beautiful, filled with wonderful art treasures and numberless books, with many rare and costly editions. He has lectured much at Oxford; and of late years his lectures have been so crowded that tickets had to be procured to attend them. This, when the lectures of the most learned professors of the university are often given to a beggarly array of empty boxes.