MILLAIS AND THE RUSKINS by Mary Lutyens. 296 pages. Vanguard. $8.50.
John Ruskin had a rare eye for beauty. Directed outward, it helped make him the greatest art critic of his century, as well as a generous champion of social reform who hoped to remove a measure of industrial ugliness from the Victorian scene. In private life, though, this intense esthetic susceptibility proved an acute embarrassment. It embroiled him in a number of skittish skirmishes with women, all pretty and all too young. Like a "just-fledged owlet," as he put it, he began by...
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