Necessity, instead of advancing your studies, stops them. Whenever her harsh voice speaks it becomes your duty to shut your books, put aside your instruments, and do something that will fetch a price in the market. The man of science has to abandon the pursuit of a discovery to go and deliver a popular lecture a hundred miles off, for which he gets five pounds and his railway fare. The student of ancient literature has to read some feeble novel, and give three days of a valuable life to write an anonymous review which will bring him two pounds ten. The artist has to leave his serious picture to manufacture "pot-boilers," which will teach him nothing, but only spoil his hands and vitiate the public taste. The poet suspends his poem (which is promised to a publisher for Christmas, and will be spoiled in consequence by hurry at the last) in order to write newspaper articles on subjects of which he has little knowledge and in which he takes no interest. And yet these are instances of those comparatively happy and fortunate needy who are only compelled to suspend their intellectual life, and who can cheer themselves in their enforced labor with the hope of shortly renewing it. What of those others who are pushed out of their path forever by the buffets of unkindly fortune? Many a fine intellect has been driven into the deep quagmire, and has struggled in it vainly till death came, which but for that grim necessity might have scaled the immortal mountains. This metaphor of the mountains has led me, by a natural association of ideas, to think of a writer who has added to our enjoyment of their beauty, and I think of him the more readily that his career will serve as an illustration--far better than any imaginary career--of the very subject which just now occupies my mind. Mr. Ruskin is not only one of the best instances, but he is positively the very best instance except the two Humboldts, of an intellectual career which has been greatly aided by material prosperity, and which would not have been possible without it. This does not in the least detract from the merit of the author of "Modern Painters," for it needed a rare force of resolution, or a powerful instinct of genius, to lead the life of a severe student under every temptation to indolence. Still it is true that Mr. Ruskin's career would have been impossible for a poor man, however gifted. A poor man would not have had access to Mr. Ruskin's materials, and one of his chief superiorities has always been an abundant wealth of material. And if we go so far as to suppose that the poor man might have found other materials perhaps equivalent to these, we know that he could not have turned them to that noble use. The poor critic would be immediately absorbed in the ocean of anonymous periodical literature; he could not find time for the incubation of great works. "Modern Painters," the result of seventeen years of study, is not simply a work of genius but of genius seconded by wealth.