walked vigorously, he stood, and spoke, and, above all, he laughed like a man in the full vigor of his life.... He would attempt nothing--show no interest in anything--which he could not do, and which he did not understand. But he was not on that account forced to confine himself to literature. Every one knows how he read. Most readers of these lines, though they may never have seen him act,--as I never did,--still know that his acting was excellent. As an actor he would have been at the top of his profession. And he had another gift,--had it so wonderfully, that it may almost be said that he has left no equal behind him. He spoke so well, that a public dinner became a blessing instead of a curse, if he was in the chair,--had its compensating twenty minutes of pleasure, even if he were called upon to propose a toast, or to thank the company for drinking his health. For myself, I never could tell how far his speeches were ordinarily prepared:--but I can declare that I have heard him speak admirably when he has had to do so with no moment of preparation. A great man has gone from us--such a one that we may surely say of him that we shall not look upon his like again. As years roll on, we shall learn to appreciate his loss. He now rests in the spot consecrated to the memory of our greatest and noblest; and Englishmen would certainly not have been contented had he been laid elsewhere. XXVII RUSKIN'S CHILDHOOD We are fortunate in having Ruskin's own account of how he passed his childhood days. In _Præterita_ we have his autobiography. His description of his early days runs as follows: "I am and my father was before me a violent Tory of the old school (Walter Scott's school, that is to say, and Homer's); I name these two out of the numberless great Tory writers, because they were my own two masters. I had Walter Scott's novels and the _Iliad_ (Pope's translation), for my only reading when I was a child, on weekdays; on Sunday their effect was tempered by _Robinson Crusoe_ and the _Pilgrim's Progress_, my mother having it deeply in her heart to make an evangelical clergyman of me. Fortunately, I had an aunt more evangelical than her mother, and my aunt gave me cold mutton for Sunday's dinner, which, as I much preferred it hot, greatly diminished the influence of the _Pilgrim's Progress_, and the end of the matter was, that I got all of the imaginative teachings of De Foe and Bunyan, and yet--am not an evangelical clergyman. "I had, however, still better teaching than theirs, and that compulsorily, and every day of the week.