Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: JOHN RUSKIN. THE surprise, perplexity, and sometimes indeed exasperation with which so many of even the more sympathetic of Mr. Ruskin's earlier readers and critics have received his recent works must be frankly admitted, and as far as possible accounted for. To most people, ordinary difficulties, such as are exhibited by other authors, whether of unconvention- ality of thought, profundity of learning, or intricacy of style, are far exceeded by the personal one—of interpreting what seems an unreasonable and violent change of career. They hear of a veteran art teacher, critic, and man of letters suddenly casting aside his hard-won laurels, resuming the weapons with which in his youth he had hardly slain the small art-critics of the magazines, dashing off into apparently the most remote of all possible fields, that of political economy, casting down his glove in challenge among its sturdy and sober cultivators, loudly proclaiming their patiently- gathered harvest mere tares and darnel, hurling blazing pamphlets into the overflowing granaries of their science, and charging with fiery impetuosity against its massive logic mills. It is not, then, to be wondered at, if the bystanders, mostly, plain common-sense people, who think that art and political economy are no doubt all very well,but will get on best, as they themselves have done, by minding their own business and letting that of other folks alone, see in this would-be-delivering knight only the latest avatar of the truly immortal hero of Cervantes, and so either join merrily in the hooting, or pass by in sorrow, as their own moral temper happens to incline. Even from those who love progress so warmly as not to be deterred by the strange appearance of the new reformer, and who seek the out-of- the-way village where costly bo... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.