professorship, and he withdrew to Brantwood. After some months of complete retirement he was able to resume work on The Bible of Amiens, an ambitious treatise on architecture as applied to the history of Christendom, on which he was busy from 1880 to 1885; and he superintended the collection of his public correspondence in Arrows of the Chace (1880). But in 1882 another attack of brain disease prostrated him, and though he was re-elected Slade Professor at Oxford he was not happy there. He withdrew again, and this time finally, out of the world; from 1884 to 1900 he never left Brantwood. Here, in lucid intervals, he wrote and sent forth his autobiographic notes, Præterita, the latest important production of Ruskin. He had by this time given away or distributed in Quixotic enterprises the whole of his parental fortune, amounting, it is said, to nearly a quarter of a million-"his pensioners were numbered by hundreds ❞—his works, however, formed a valuable source of income. He was left, by the death of Tennyson in 1892, unquestionably the most eminent of living English writers, and he received every token of popular respect and esteem. His brain-power, however, though not positively clouded, was greatly enfeebled, and for the last ten years of his life he took no part in affairs. He suffered from no long disease, but towards the close of his eighty-first year, after three days' decline of strength, he passed quietly away at Brantwood on the 20th of January 1900. His intellectual activity and power of literary work had been prodigious, and yet their exercise had left him time to produce innumerable water-colour and pencil drawings of an exquisite finish. He was liable to be torn, all his life through, by conflicting storms of rage and hatred and despair, but found refuge from them in what he held to be "the only constant form of true religion, namely, useful work and faithful love and stintless charity." Ruskin was tall and spare, with a face the serenity and fulness of the upper part of which was injured by something almost cruel in the expression of the mouth; this was rectified in later life by the growth of a magnificent white beard. He lies buried in the churchyard of Coniston, a funeral in Westminster Abbey being refused by his family at his express direction.

But, I think, the noblest sea that Turner has ever painted, and, if so, the noblest certainly ever painted by man, is that of the Slave Ship, the chief Academy picture of the Exhibition of 1840. It is a sunset on the Atlantic, after prolonged storm; but the storm is partially lulled, and the torn and streaming rain-clouds are moving in scarlet lines to lose themselves in the hollow of the night. The whole surface of sea included in the picture is divided into two ridges of enormous swell, not high, nor local, but a low, broad, heaving of the whole ocean, like the lifting of its bosom by deep breath after the torture of the storm. Between these two ridges the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendour which burns like gold, and bathes like blood. Along this fiery path and valley, the tossing waves by which the swell of the sea is restlessly divided, lift themselves in dark, indefinite, fantastic forms, each casting a faint and ghastly shadow behind it along the illumined foam. They do not rise everywhere, but three or four together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously, as the under strength of the swell compels or permits them; leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamp-like fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining sun, now fearfully dyed from above with the indistinguishable images of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery flying. Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon