Amazon.com description: Product Description: This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1895. Excerpt: ... XXII. MR. RUSKIN (concluded). ENOUGH must have been said in the last paper of the singular weaknesses and contradictions which meet us everywhere in Mr. Ruskin. It remains to say something of their probable causes, and of the merits which accompany, and, as I think, far outweigh them, everywhere but in his dabblings with economics. The sources of Mr. Ruskin's peculiarities, both in merit and defect, appear to me to have lain as usual in his nature, and to have been developed as usual by his education. This latter (as in the case of that other eccentric Camberwell man, Mr. Browning) was of a home-keeping and haphazard kind, very different from the usual up-bringing of well-to-do middle-class youth in England. It is true that Mr. Ruskin, unlike Mr. Browning, went to a University, though, like him, he went to no school; and his comparative chastity of form may be partly ascribed to this frequentation of the Muses. But Christ Church, which does not like to be called a "college" at all, is even now probably the college of both Universities in which the University and, strictly speaking, collegiate influences are weakest; while for a gentlemancommoner in Mr. Ruskin's time they were weaker still. The shaping, moulding, training influence of the ordinary English liberal education has been abused as well as lauded, and I suppose that it may to a certain extent and in certain cases act as a cramp and a restraint; but it certainly acts in a far greater number as a beneficial discipline. Discipline is what Mr. Ruskin has always lacked; as well in methods of expression as in the serene self-confidence which has enabled him to deliver himself on any and every subject, without any suspicion that he is r talking ill-informed nonsense. Discipline Oxford did not give, had ...