THE WORKS OF JOHN RUSKIN.
The Works of John Ruskin. Edited by E. T. Cook and A. Wedder- burn. (G. Allen. 21s.)—This is the first volume of a library edition of the most complete and exhaustive kind. The present volume, which contains early works, is liberally annotated, and differences between the MSS. and printed version are carefully noted in a way that seems out of keeping with the slightness of many of these very early productions. An essay on the relative dignity of painting and music, written at the age of nineteen, is curiously characteristic of the man. He starts with the desire to prove that painting is the nobler art of the two, and is able to do so completely to his own satisfaction. The process is simple, for although he understands the nature of the intellect and study re- quired to produce a great work of painting, he all the way through treats music as a matter of merely composing "an air." Music in its great forms of symphony and opera is apparently quite unknown to him. There would be no interest in this youthful essay if it were not so curiously akin to so much of the great writer's form of argument in his maturity. Mr. E. T. Cook writes an introduc- tion to this volume which, it is needless to say, is a model of its kind.
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