Able and weak, affects the very brutes

And birds - how say I? flowers of the field

As a wise workman recognizes tools

In a master's workshop, loving what they make.
Thus is the man as harmless as a lamb:

Only impatient, let him do his best,

At ignorance and carelessness and sin."

"Don't you know," he wrote to a friend (January 8, 1880), “that I am entirely with you in this Irish misery, and have been these thirty years? only one can't speak plain without distinctly becoming a leader of Revolution? I know that Revolution must come in all the world - but I can't act with Danton or Robespierre, nor with the. modern French Republican or Italian one. I could with you and your Irish, but you are only at the beginning of the end. I have spoken, — and plainly too, for all who have ears, and hear."

If he had spoken plainly about "landlordism," as they call it, he had spoken plainly too on the subject of capital. Nowadays every well-informed person knows that a vast number of influential thinkers hold rightly or wrongly — that the pri vate exploitation of labor is an error, if not a crime. But even in 1880, the doctrine of collectivism was too strange, even to educated people, to be heard with anything but the extremest impatience. The author of " Fors" had tried to show that the nineteenth-century commercialist spirit was not new; that the tyranny of capital was the old sin of usury over again; and he asked why preachers of religion did not denounce it, why, for

example, the Bishop of Manchester did not, on simply religious grounds, oppose the teaching of the "Manchester school," who were the chief supporters of the commercialist economy. Not until the end of 1879 had Dr. Fraser been aware of the challenge; but at length he wrote, justifying his attitude. The popular and able bishop had much to say on the expediency of the commercial system and the error of taking the Bible literally; but he did not seem to have any conception of Mr. Ruskin's standpoint; he seemed unaware of the revolution in economical thought which " Unto this Last" and "Fors" had been pioneering.

"I'm not gone to Venice yet," wrote Mr. Ruskin to Miss Beever, "but thinking of it hourly. I'm very nearly done with toasting my bishop; he just wants another turn or two, and then a little butter." The toasting and the buttering, both neatly done, appeared in the "Contemporary Review" for February, 1880; reprinted in the "Old Road" (vol. ii., pp. 202-238); and if the reader have insight into the course of modern thought, he will see that Mr. Ruskin's rejoinder was much more than a bit of clever persiflage.

This incident led him to feel that the mission. of "Fors" was not finished. If bishops were still unenlightened, there was yet work to do. And so he gave up Venice, and resumed his crusade.

Brantwood life was occasionally interrupted by short excursions to London or elsewhere. In the autumn Mr. Ruskin had heard Professor Huxley

on the evolution of reptiles; and this suggested another treatment of the subject, from his own artistic and ethical point of view, in a lecture oddly called "A Caution to Snakes," given at the London Institution, March 17, 1880 (repeated March 23d, and printed in " Deucalion," part vii.). In the course of this address he gave some notes of his observations on the motion of snakes, and claimed to be the first to have explained how they did not creep or drag themselves along, but traveled by a sort of skating action. Whether he

was right in believing this to be a discovery I cannot say; but it was the result of much watching of the ways of adders in freedom on his moor, in addition to study at the Zoological Gardens, where he used to get the cases opened, to "make friends" with the snakes.

Mr. Ruskin was not merely an amateur zoölogist and F. Z. S., but a devoted lover and keen observer of animals. It would take long to tell the story of all his dogs, from the spaniel Dash, commemorated in his earliest poems, and Wisie, whose sagacity is related in "Præterita," down through the long line of bulldogs, St. Bernards, and collies, to Bramble, the reigning favorite; and all the cats who made his study their home, or were flirted with abroad. To Miss Beever, from Bolton Abbey (January 24, 1875) he describes the Wharfe in flood, and then continues: "I came home (to the hotel) to quiet tea, and a black kitten called Sweep, who lapped half my cream-jugftl

།

(and yet I had plenty), sitting on my shoulder." Grip, the pet rook at Denmark Hill, is mentioned in "My First Editor," as celebrated in verse by Mr. W. H. Harrison.

Kindness to animals has often been noted as one of the most striking traits of Mr. Ruskin, — a sympathy with them which goes much deeper than benevolent sentiment, or the curiosity of science. He cared little about their organization and anatomy, much about their habits and characters. He had not Thoreau's powers of observation and intimate acquaintance with all the details of wild life, but his attitude towards animals and plants was the same; hating the science that murders to dissect; resigning his professorship at Oxford, finally, because vivisection was introduced into the university; and supporting the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals with all his heart. But, as he said at the annual meeting in 1877, he objected to the sentimental fiction and exaggerated statements which some of its members circulated. They had endeavored to prevent cruelty to animals," he said, "but they had not enough endeavored to promote affection for animals. He trusted to the pets of children for their education, just as much as to their tutors."

It was to carry out this idea (to anticipate a little) that he founded the Society of Friends of Living Creatures, which he addressed, May 23, 1885, at the club, Bedford Park, in his capacity

of not president

-but "papa." The members, boys and girls from seven to fifteen, promised not to kill nor hurt any animal for sport, nor tease creatures; but to make friends of their pets and watch their habits, and collect facts about natural history.

I remember, on one of the rambles at Coniston in the early days, how we found a wounded buzzard, - one of the few creatures of the eagle kind that our English mountains still breed. The rest of us were not very ready to go near the beak and talons of the fierce-looking and, as we supposed, desperate bird. Mr. Ruskin quietly took it up in his arms, felt it over to find the hurt, and carried it, quite unresistingly, out of the way of dogs and passers-by, to a place where it might die in solitude or recover in safety. He often told his Oxford hearers that he would rather they learned to love birds than to shoot them; and his wood and moor were harbors of refuge for hunted game or vermin," and his windows the rendezvous of the little birds, though, indeed, they hardly want a friend at Coniston as long as the Thwaite feeds them with lavish bounty.

66

Mr. Ruskin had not been abroad since the spring of 1877, and in August, 1880, felt able to travel again. He went for a tour among the northern French cathedrals, staying at his old haunts, Abbeville, Amiens, Beauvais, Chartres, Rouen, and then returned with Mr. A. Severn and Mr. Brabazon to Amiens, where he spent the