This is a volume of miscellanies, collecting the papers and a book written by Ruskin on artistic and literary subjects between 1865 and 1869, together with one paper of an earlier date. It contains three lectures of considerable interest which have not hitherto been published, and presents in a complete form a series of papers on the laws of art, hitherto so attainable only in the back numbers of a periodical.

The contents of the volume, which are arranged chronologically, are as follow:—

I. A paper on Sir Joshua and Holbein, which originally appeared in the Cornhill Magazine for March 1860.—This is a chapter which was crowded out from the last volume of Modern Painters, and recalls in style and treatment the chapters in that volume which contrast Dürer and Salvator, Wouvermans and Angelico, or Rubens and Paul Veronese. If the reader will compare § 15 of this paper (p. 12) with the chapter in Modern Painters describing the difference in the outlook of Dürer and Holbein on the one side, and of Salvator on the other, he will see at once that the passage upon Holbein must have been written at the same time and with the same ideas in the author's mind.

II. A paper on The Study of Architecture in Schools, read to the Royal Institute of British Architects on May 15, 1865.—Into this paper Ruskin compressed much that was most deeply felt in his theory of the place of the fine arts in human life, and the discussion which followed the reading of his paper shows the strong impression which it made at the time.