As a theorist of aesthetic statism, John Ruskin seems both very close to and very far from our twentieth-century worldview. In his sociological analyses of art in The Stones of Venice and his critiques of classical political economy in Unto this Last, Ruskin seems very contemporary, but in his embrace of medieval ideals of chivalry and domesticity he seems hopelessly retrograde. This is particularly a problem with Sesame and Lilies. One could try to solve the problem by writing off Sesame and Lilies as a flawed production of Ruskin's failing latter years. But Ruskin produced this work in the same decade as Unto this Last, and he himself argues that it emerges out of the same social vision as his critiques of political economy. For example, in his preface to the 1882 edition of Sesame and Lilies, he concludes by stating that “it was written while my energies were still unbroken and my temper unfretted; and that, if read in connection with Unto this Last, it contains the chief truths I have endeavoured through all my past life to display” (WR, XVIII, 52). Clearly, Sesame and Lilies held a high place for Ruskin as an expression of his mature thought.