No doubt any other professional career would have ended with a message. What an explosion might have occurred in the Church had his mother’s wish been fulfilled, and he become a clergyman, with a Bishop to look after him. As it was, his father’s art tastes and preoccupation with pictures and with picturesque scenery, and the boy’s own early skill both as writer and draughtsman, led him, after an attempt at poetry, to become by profession a writer on Art. There he had the opportunity of elaborating his mighty implement, that superb, facile, plastic instrument of music and voice of thunder, his inimitable style. It is that which ensures the preservation of his work. Noble style is the antiseptic which preserves from decay the written words of men. Books without style are not read long. In classifying the books in our libraries, under what head shall we place the seventy volumes of John Ruskin? There is much temptation to fall back helplessly upon the heading “Miscellaneous”; for he wrote on Art, including Sculpture, Engraving, Architecture and Heraldry; on Economics, History and constructive Politics; on Botany, Meteorology, Ornithology, Geology, and Mineralogy; he wrote Guide-books, Poems, Autobiography, Literary Criticism; he treated Theology, Ethics, Education, Music and Mythology; he brought out regularly for seven years a monthly periodical _de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis_; he edited Biography, German stories and translations from the Greek and the Italian: he wrote Dialogue and Fairy Tale. Where shall we seek for unity in this manifold outpouring of a versatile genius, who touched none of these subjects without irradiating it? In that fact lies our key. With what did he irradiate this comprehensive list of human interests? The answer cannot be doubtful in the mind of any careful student. He told us how it seemed to him that all these things looked to the eye of God. He tried to solve all questions by the flashlight of the Eternal. He worked at agate and crystal that it might reveal the beauty of the Lord; he fought his social crusade for the sake of the dim disinherited multitude who had no eyes for the Divine loveliness, and no glory to behold: and for the sake of justice and of love which wealth and luxury denied. He was a messenger of the Most High to modern needs; and his eager soul found a service throughout this wide range of science and art.