13 JUNE 1874, Page 3

Mr. Ruskin has been writing from Rome, to a Glasgow

com- mittee for organising lectures, a Carlylean piece of invective against the taste for popular lectures. "1 find," he says, "the desire of audiences to be audiences only, becoming an entirely pestilent character of the age." (Why, by the way, does Mr. Ruskin "find" this, instead of noticing or observing it? and why does he use the adverb " entirely " with his adjective, in prefer- ence to 'very,' or any other intensive ? In Mr. Carlyle these are idioms translated from the German use of " finden " and "ganz," but Mr. Ruskin is not a Germaniser, and his own English style is so polished and effective, that it is doubly perverse of him to Carlyleise in his discourse.) "Everybody wants," Mr Ruskin goes on, "to get the knowledge it has cost a man half his life to gather, first sweetened up to make it palatable, and then kneaded into the smallest possible pills, and to swallow it homceopathic,ally and be wise,—this is the passionate desire and hope of the multitude of the day. It is not to be done." "Your modern fire-working, smooth - downy - curry - and - strawberry - ice-and - milk-punch. altogether lecture is an extremely pestilent and abominable vanity ; and the miserable death of poor Dickens, when he might have been writing blessed books till he was eighty, but for the pestiferous demand of the mob, is a very solemn warning to us all, if we would take it." As far as we understand the story of the public " readings " which exhausted Mr. Dickens, and probably hastened his death, the demand of the mob for the lec- tures was not so " pestiferous " as the demand of Mr. Dickens for the dollars of "the mob." Surely nothing can be less just than to revile the public thus fiercely for their taste for an innocent amuse- ment.