The Life of John Ruskin

8, 1819, at half-past seven in the morning. He w

is just now on my knees sleeping and looking so sweetly; I hope I shall not get proud of him." He was a fine healthy baby, and at four months was "beginning to give more decided proofs that he knows what he wants,

nts, taking him out for his daily walk to Duppas Hill with a captain's biscuit in her muff, for fear he should be hungry by the way; we hear her teaching him his first lessons, with astonishment at his wonderful memory, and glorying with Nurse Anne over his behaviour in church; and all these things she retails in gossiping letters to her husband, while Mr. Richard Gray gives two-year-old John "his first lesson on

sea to stay with his aunt Jessie, Mrs. Richardson of Perth. There he found cousins to play with, especially one, little Jessie, of nearly his own age; he found a river with deep swirling pools, that impressed him

ll to be painted; who, moreover, had a face worth painting, not unlike the model from whom Northcote's master, the great Sir Joshua, had painted his famous cherubs. The painter asked him to come again, and sit as the hero of a fancy picture, bought at the Academy by the flattered parents. There is a grove, a flock of

arrow. It is all built up now; but their house (later No. 28) must have been as secluded as any in a country village. There were ample gardens front and rear, well stocked with fruit and flowers-quite an Eden for a little boy, and all the more that the fruit of it was forbidden. It was here that all his years of youth were sp

were continued yearly. Mr. John James Ruskin still travelled for the business, then greatly extending. "Strange," he writes on one occasion, "that Watson [his right-hand man] went this journey without getting one order, and everyone gives me an order directly." In return for these services to the firm, Mr. Telford, the capitalist partner, took the vacant chair at t

le customer unvisited; and in the intervals of business seeing all the sights of the places they passed through-colleges and churches, galleries and parks, ruins, castles, caves, lakes, and mountains-and seeing them all, not listlessly, but with keen interest, noting everything, inquiring for local information, looking up books of refere

that age, the feelings expressed in one of the notable passages in "Modern Painters." Thence they went on to Scotland, and revisited their relatives at Perth. In 1825 they took a more extended tour, and spent a few weeks in Paris, partly for the festivities at the coronation of Charles X., partly for busine

contemporary, the same tale is told. But while the incident that marks the baby Browning is the aside, à propos of a whimpering sister, "Pew-opener, remove that

le words at a time by the look of them, and to write in vertical characters like book-print, just as the latest improved theories of education suggest. His first letter may be quoted as illustrating his own account of his childhood, and as proving how en

DEAR

e a whip, coloured red and black.... To-morrow is Sabbath. Tuesday I go to Croydon. I am going to take my boats and my ship to Croydon. I'll sail them on the pond near the burn which the bridge

aph in stragg

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le-reading and in reciting the Scotch paraphrases of the Psalms and other verse, which fo

fun and pranks, not without companions, though solitary when at home, and kept precisely, in the hope of guarding him from every danger. He was so little afraid of animals-a great test of a child's nerves-that about this time he must needs meddle with their fierce Newfoundland dog, Lion, which bit him in the mouth, and spoiled his looks. Anothe

complete library of his whole works. But in a letter of March 4, 1829, his mother says to his father: "If you think of writing John, would you impress on him the propriety of not beginning too eagerly and becoming careless towards the end of his works,

e boy, and also drawn." It was begun in 1826, and continued at intervals until 1829. It was all done laboriously in imitation of print, and, to complete the illusion, contained a page of errata. This great work was, of course, never completed, though he laboured through three volumes; but when he tired

n everything, and all-attempting eagerness, out of which the first t