The Life of John Ruskin

is father's wealth and influence could do for him had been supplemented by a personal charm, which found him friends among the best men of

duates are entitled to expect; and, for crowning mercy, his head was not turned. He was reading extremely hard-"in" for his degree examination next Eas

y. The first use he made of his wealth was to buy another Turner. In the Easter vacation he met Mr. Griffith, the dealer, at the private view of the old Water-colour Society, and hearing that the "Harlech Castle" was for sale, he bought it there and then, with the characteristic disregard for money which has always made the vendors of pi

Turner as a morose and niggardly, inexplicable man. As he had seen faults in Turner's painting, so he was ready to acknowledge the faults in his character. But while the rest of the world, with a very few exceptions, dwe

orts, shrewd, perhaps a little selfish, highly intellectual, the powers of the mind not brought out with any delight in their manifestation, or intention of display,

eccentric painter's habits of life permitted. He seems to have been more at home with the father than with the son; but even when the you

he was working very hard during this spring; but hard reading does not of itself kill people, only when it is combined with real and prolonged menta

ches from Orleans to Tours, famous for their Renaissance architecture and for the romance of their chivalric history. Amboise especially made a strong impression upon the languid and unwilling invalid. It stirred him up to write, in easy verse, the tale of love and death that his own situation too readily suggested. In "The Broken Chain" he indulged his gloomy fancy, turning, as it was sure to do, into a morbid nigh

ly, and yet suggesting chiaroscuro with broad washes of quiet tone and touches of light, cleverly introduced-"that marvellous pop of light across the foreground," Harding said of the picture of the Great Pyramid-these drawings were a mean between the limited manner of Prout and the inimitable fulness of Turner Ruskin took up the fine pencil and the broad brush,

ething piquant was needed to arouse him; the mild ecstasies of common connoisseurship hardly appeal to a young man between life and death. He met the friends to whom he had brought introductions-Mr. Joseph Severn, who had been Keats' companion, and was afterwards to be the genial Consul at Rome, and the two Messrs

oitered for a couple of months in the neighbourhood of Naples, visiting the various scenes of interest-Sorrento, Amalfi, Sale

he had once imagined in his "Leoni." From Naples he wrote an account of a landslip near Giagnano, and sent it home to the Ashmolean Society. He seemed better; they turned homewards, when suddenly he was seized with al

of intense depression; and he records that one day, in church at Geneva, he resolved to do something, to be something useful. That he could make such a resolve was a sign of returning health; but if, as I find, he had just been reading Ca

a sensible one, and successful in subduing for several years to come the more serious phases of the disease. The patient was not cured; he suffered from time to time from his chest, and still more from a weakness of the spine, which during all the period of his early manhood gave him trouble, and finished by bending his tall and lithe figure into something that, were it not for his face, would be de

there was a family at Perth whose daughter came to visit at Herne Hill-the Effie Gray whom afterwards he married. She challenged the melancholy John, engrossed in his drawing and geology, to write a fairytale, as the le