errors are errors no doubt, and ought to be pointed out, and there an end. Virgil was not writing a history of the foundation of Carthage. Shakespeare was not describing the social life of Rome under Julius Cæsar. Milton was not a gazetteer of the revolt of Lucifer and his angels. Mr. Ruskin might as well dispose of a sculptured group of Centaurs by remarking that there never were Centaurs, or of the famous hermaphrodite in the Louvre by explaining that hermaphrodites of that perfect order are unknown to physiology. The beauty of color and contour, the effect of graceful grouping, the reach of poetic imagination, the dignity of embodied thought, outlive all such criticism even when in its way it is just, for they bear in themselves the vindication of their existence. But Ruskin's criticism is the legitimate result of the cardinal error of his career--the belief that the morality of art exactly corresponds with the morality of human life; that there is a central law of right and wrong for everything, like Stephen Pearl Andrews's universal science, of which when you have once got the key you can open every lock--which is the solving word of every enigma, the standard by which everything is finally to be judged. I need not show how he followed out that creed and gave it a new application in "The Seven Lamps of Architecture" and the "Stones of Venice." In these masterpieces of eloquent declamation, the building of houses was brought up to be tried according to Mr. Ruskin's self-constructed canons of æsthetic and architectural morality. No one, I venture to think, cares much about the doctrine; everybody is carried away by the eloquence, the originality, and the feeling. Later still Mr. Ruskin applied the same central, all-pervading principle to the condemnation of fluttering ribbons in a woman's bonnet. The stucco of a house he set down as false and immoral, like the painting of a meretricious cheek. His æsthetic transcendentalism soon ceased to have any practical influence. It would be idle to try to persuade English house-builders that the attributes of a building are moral qualities, and that the component parts of a London residence ought to symbolize and embody "action," "voice," and "beauty." It may be doubted whether a single architect was ever practically influenced by the dogmatic eloquence of Mr. Ruskin. In fact the architects, above all other men, rebelled against the books and scorned them. But the books made their way with the public, who, caring nothing about the principles of morality which underlie the construction of houses, were charmed by the dazzling rhetoric, the wealth of gorgeous imagery, the interesting and animated digressions, the frequent flashes of vigorous good sense, and the lofty thought whose only fault was that which least affected the ordinary reader--its utter inapplicability to the practical subject of the books.