Vernons are ever ready at critical moments to be a help and a guidance to men; and finally he appeals to the great Florentine, and shows us Beatrice leading Dante through the starry spheres of heaven up to the very throne of light and of truth. But the book is full of healthy and helpful passages, and is, like so much that its author has written, a moral inspiration for all who read it. "I am a great man," Ruskin once said, with a consciousness of genius which reminds us that Horace and Milton, Shakspere and Goethe were equally outspoken. Posterity, we may well believe, will endorse the self-criticism, and will not willingly let his works or his memory die. Of late years Mr Ruskin has lived, not in the most robust health, in a house at Coniston, in the English Lake District. The next most prominent critic of the period is one upon whom Ruskin has always poured his bitterest scorn, and who yet will be ever remembered with warmest reverence by those who are old enough to have been his contemporaries. I mean John Stuart Mill. Jeremy Bentham, who gave such an impulse to all political reform, and made a complete revolution in English jurisprudence, died in 1832. His friend James Mill, who wrote the "History of India" and an "Analysis of the Human Mind," died four years later. "It was," says Professor Bain, "James Mill's greatest contribution to human progress to have given us his son." It may be so, and yet he seems to have done his utmost to spoil the gift, not, as children are usually spoiled, by over-indulgence, but by the most excessive severity.