The Life of John Ruskin

e of seven. It is a tale of a mouse, in seven octosyllabic couplets, "The Needless

g to them in the drawing-room at Herne Hill. John was packed into a recess, where he was out of the way and the draught; he was barricaded by a little table that held his own materials for amusement, and if he liked to listen to the reading, he had the chance of hearing good literature

very summer brought its crop of description, so against the New Year (for, being Scotch, they did not then keep our Christmas) and against his father's birthday in

e confused the real valley that interested him so with Scott's ideal Glendearg, and, partly for this reason, to have found a greater pleasure in "The Monastery," which he thereupon undertook to paraphras

rning, if they needed it, to keep their own child's brain from over-pressure. It is evident that they did their best to "keep him back"; they did not send him to school for fear of the excitement of competitive study. His mother put him through the Latin grammar herself, using the old Adam's manual which his father had used at Edinburgh High School. Even this old grammar

book." It was not idleness that made him break off such plans, but just the reverse-a too great activity of brain. His parents seem to have thought that there was no harm in this apparently quiet reading and writing. They were extremely energetic themselves, and hated idleness. They appear to have held a theory that the

older than John, and able to be a companion to him in his lessons and travels. There was no sentimentality about his attachment to her, but a steady fraternal relationship, he, of course, being the little lord and master; but she was not without spirit, which enabled her to hold her own, and perseverance, which sometimes help

axed away, and found a happy home at Herne Hill, and frequent celebration in his young master's verses. So the family was now complete-papa and mamma, Mary and John and Dash. One other figure must not be forgo

te than any, sixteen pages in a red cover, with a title-page quite like print: "Battle of Waterloo | a play |

ntwater." A recast of these, touched up by some older hand, and printed in The

likely that the drawings attributed to this year were done in 1831. He was, however, busy writing poetry. At Tunbridge, for example, he wrote that fragment "On Happiness" which ca

poems dated. This new energy seems to have been roused by the gift from his Croydon cousin Charles, a clerk in the publishing house of Smith, Elder, and Co., o

Mrs. Ruskin's dining-room. He says in the letter-this is at ten years old: "Well, papa, seeing how fond I was of the doctor, and knowing him to be an excellent Latin scholar, got him for me as a tutor, and every lesson I get I like him better and better, for he makes me laugh 'almost, if not quite'-to use one of his own expressions-the whole time. He is so funny, comparing Neptun

hty," as well she might, when, after six months' Greek, he proposed (in March, 1831) to begin Hebrew with John. It was a great misfortune for the you

other lives in Coventry Patmore's "Angel in the House." When Ruskin, thirty years later, wrote of that doubtfully-received poem, that it was the "sweetest analysis we