He had inherited a fortune of approximately a million
dollars, and he now began to dispose of it in various charitable
schemes,--establishing tea-shops, supporting young painters, planning
model tenements, but, above all, in elaborating his ideas for the
Guild. The result of it all--whatever particular reforms were effected
or manual industries established--was, to Ruskin's view, failure, and
his mind, weakening under the strain of its profound disappointments,
at last crashed in ruin.
[Sidenote: Death in 1900.]
It is needless to follow the broken author through the desolation
of his closing years to his death in 1900. Save for his charming
reminiscences, _Praeterita_, his work was done; the long struggle was
over, the struggle of one man to reduce the complexities of a national
life to an apostolic simplicity, to make it beautiful and good,
Till the high God behold it from beyond,
And enter it.
[1] _Praeterita_. He was born February 8, 1819.
[2] Ruskin himself quotes a not very brilliant specimen in _Modern
Painters_, III, in "Moral of Landscape."
[3] _Praeterita_, Sec. 53.
[4] _The Mystery of Life._
II
THE UNITY OF RUSKIN'S WRITINGS
[Sidenote: Diversity of his writings.]
Ruskin is often described as an author of bewildering variety, whose
mind drifted waywardly from topic to topic--from painting to political
economy, from architecture to agriculture--with a license as
illogical as it was indiscriminating.
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