''One of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century.'' William Morris, in the Preface. The Nature of Gothic started life as a chapter in Ruskin''s masterwork, The Stones of Venice. Ruskin came to lament the ''Frankenstein monsters'' of Victorian buildings with added Gothic which ''The Stones'' inspired; but despite his misgivings the original moral purpose of his writing had not fallen on stony ground. The Nature of Gothic, the last chapter of the second volume, had marked his progression from art critic to social critic; in it he found the true seam of his thought, and it was quickly recognised for the revolutionary writing it was. As Morris himself put it, The Nature of Gothic ''pointed out a new road on which the world should travel''; and in its indictment of meaningless modern labour and its celebration of medieval architecture it could be called the foundation stone of M
