“Who was Ruskin anyway?” asked Flanagan.
“He was one of the Great Victorians. He was a master of English style.”
“Ruskin’s style — a thing of shreds and purple patches,” said Lawson. “Besides, damn the Great Victorians. Whenever I open a paper and see Death of a Great Victorian, I thank Heaven there’s one more of them gone. Their only talent was longevity, and no artist should be allowed to live after he’s forty; by then a man has done his best work, all he does after that is repetition. Don’t you think it was the greatest luck in the world for them that Keats, Shelley, Bonnington, and Byron died early? What a genius we should think Swinburne if he had perished on the day the first series of Poems and Ballads was published!”