The following pages contain the first volume of Modern Painters, the book by which Ruskin, whose juvenilia have occupied the preceding volumes of this edition, first made his mark as a prose-writer. The successive volumes of Modern Painters were in some respects independent works. They form not one book, but four or five. The first volume was published in 1843; the fifth not till 1860. Between the first and second there was an interval of three years (1843–46), and in point of view and in style a marked distinction. Between the second volume and the third and fourth (which were issued together) there was an interval of ten years (1846–56); and there was another interval of four years (1856–60) before the fifth and final volume was published. During these intervals Ruskin did a great deal of other work. Thus, to mention his principal books only, during the second of the intervals he wrote and published The Seven Lamps of Architecture and The Stones of Venice; and in the last interval, The Political Economy of Art, foreshadowing his studies in social and political questions. There is in the five volumes of Modern Painters a unity of purpose, but it is an increasing purpose. “In the main aim and principle of the book,” said its author in his preface to the last volume, “there is no variation, from its first syllable to its last.