literature at King's College, London. In painting he had
lessons from Copley Fielding and afterwards from ]. D. Harding.
But in the incessant travelling, drawing, collecting specimens
and composition in prose and verse he had gained but a very
moderate classical and mathematical knowledge when he
matriculated at Oxford; nor could he ever learn to write
tolerable Latin. As a boy he was active, lively and docile;
a good walker, but ignorant of all boyish games, as naif and
as innocent as a child; and he never could learn to dance or
to ride. He was only saved by his intellect and his fine nature
from turning out an arrant prig. He was regarded by his
parents, and seems to have regarded himself, as a genius.
As a child he had been “ a savant in petticoats ”; as a boy
he was a poet in breeches. At the age of seventeen he saw
Adele, the French daughter of Monsieur Domecq, Mr Ruskin's
partner, a lovely girl of fifteen. John fell rapturously in love
with her; and, it seems, the two fathers seriously contemplated
their marriage. The young poet wooed the girl with poems,
romances, dramas and mute worship, 'but received nothing
except chilling indifference and lively ridicule. To the gay
young beauty, familiar with Parisian society, the raw and
serious youth was not a possible parti. She was sent to an
English school, and he occasionally saw her. His unspoken
passion lasted about three years, when she married the Baron
Duquesne. Writing as an old man, long after her death,
Ruskin speaks of his early love without any sort of rapture.
But it is clear that it deeply coloured his life, and led to the
dangerous illness which for some two years interrupted his
studies and made him a wanderer over Europe.
As the father was resolved that John should have everything that money and pains could give, and was one day to be a bishop at least, he entered him at Christ Church, Oxford, as a gentleman-commoner-then an order reserved for men of wealth and rank. Ruskin's Oxford career, broken by the two years passed abroad, was not very full of incident or of usefulness. Though he never became either a scholar or a mathematician, he did enough accurate work to be placed in the honorary fourth class both in classics and in mathematics. By the young bloods of the “ House ” he was treated pleasantly as a raw outsider of genius. By some of the students and tutors, by Liddell, Newton, Acland and others, he was regarded as a youth of rare promise, and he made some lifelong friendships with men of mark and of power. Both he and his college took kindly the amazing proceeding of his mother, who left her husband and her home to reside in Oxford, that she might Watch over her son's health. The one success of his Oxford career was the winning the Newdigate Prize by his poem “Salsette and Elephanta, " which he recited in the Sheldonian Theatre (June 1839) Two years of ill-health and absence from home ensued. And he did not become “a Graduate of Oxford ” until 1842, in his twenty-fourth year, five years after his first entrance at the university. In fact, his desultory school and college life had been little more than an interruption and hindrance to his real education-the study of nature, of art and of literature. Long before Ruskin published books he had appeared in print. In March 1834, when he was but fifteen, London's Magazine of Natural History published an essay of his on the strata of mountains and an inquiry as to the colour of the Rhine. He then wrote for London's Magazine of Architecture, and verses of his were inserted in Messrs Smith & Elder's Friendship? Ojering, by the editor, T. Pringle, who took the lad to see the poet Rogers. At seventeen he wrote for Blackwood a defence of T urner, which the painter, to whom it was first submitted, did not take the trouble to forward to the magazine. At eighteen he wrote a series of papers, signed Kata Phusin, i.e. “ after Nature, ” for London's Magazine, on “ The Poetry of Architecture.” In 1838 (he was then nineteen) Mr London wrote to the father, “ Your son is the greatest natural genius that ever it has been my fortune to become acquainted with.” Having recovered his health and spirits by care and foreign travel, and having taken his degree and left Oxford, Ruskin set to work steadily at Heme Hill on the more elaborate defence of Turner, which was to become his first work. Modern Painters, vol. i., by “ a Graduate of Oxford, ” was published May 1843, when the author was little more than twenty-four. It produced a great and immediate sensation. It was vehemently attacked by the critics, and coolly received by the painters. Even Turner was somewhat disconcerted; but the painter was now known to both Ruskins, and they freely bought his pictures. The family then went again to the Alps, that John might study mountain formation and “, Truth ” in landscape. In 1845 he was again abroad in Italy, working on his Modern Painters, the second volume of which appeared in 1846. He had now plunged into the study of Bellini and the Venetian school, Fra Angelico and the early Tuscans, and he visited Lucca, Pisa, Florence, Padua, Verona and Venice, passionately devoting himself to architecture, sculpture and painting in each city of north Italy. He wrote a few essays for the Quarterly Review and other periodicals, and in 1849 (aet. 30) he published The Seven Lamps of Architecture, with his own etchings, which greatly increased the reputation acquired by his Modern Painters. On the 10th of April 1848, a day famous in the history of Chartism, Ruskin was married at Perth to Euphemia Chalmers Gray, a lady of great beauty, of a family long intimate with the Ruskins. The marriage, we are told, was arranged by the parents of the pair, and was a somewhat hurried act. It was evidently ill-assorted, and brought no happiness to either. They travelled, lived in London, saw society, and attended a “ Drawing-room” at Buckingham Palace. But Ruskin, immersed in various studies and projects, was no husband for a brilliant woman devoted to society. No particulars of their life have been made public. In 1854 his wife left him, obtained a nullification of the marriage under Scots law, and ultimately became. the wife of John Everett Millais. John Ruskin returned to his parents, with whom he resided till their death; and neither his marriage nor the annulling of it seems to have affected seriously his literary career. .J Ruskin's architectural studies, of which The Seven Lamps was the first fruit, turned him from Turner and Modern Painters. He planned a book about Venice in 1845, and The Stones of Venice was announced in 1849 as in preparation. After intense study in Italy and at home, early in 1851 (the year of the Great Exhibition in London) the first volume of The Stones of Venice appeared (aet. 32). It was by no means a mere antiquarian and artistic study. It was a concrete expansion of the ideas of The Seven Lamps—that the buildings and art of a people are the expression of their religion, their morality, their national aspirations and social habits. It was, as Carlyle wrote to the author, “ a sermon in stones, ” “a singular sign of the times, ” “ a new Renaissance.” It appeared in the same year with the Construction of Sheepfolds-a plea for the reunion of Christian churches—in the same year with the essay on Pre-Raphaelitilrm, the year of Turner's death (19th December). The Stones of Venice was illustrated with engravings by some of the most refined artists of his time. The author spent a World of pains in having these brought up to the highest perfection of the reproductive art, and began the system of exquisite illustration, and those facsimiles of his own and other sketches, which make his works rank so high in the catalogues and price-lists of collectors. This delicate art was carried even farther in the later volumes of Modern Painters by the school of engravers whom Ruskin inspired and gathered round him. And these now rare and coveted pieces remain to rebuke us for our modern preference for the mechanical and unnatural chiaroscuro of photogravure-the successor and destroyer of the graver's art. Although Ruskin was practised in drawing from the time that he could hold a pencil, and had lessons in painting from some eminent artists, he at no time attempted to paint pictures. He said himself that he was unable to compose a picture, and he never sought to produce anything that he would call a work of original art. His drawings, of which he produced an enormous quantity, were always intended by himself to be studies or memoranda of buildings or natural objects precisely as they appeared to his eye. Clouds, mountains, landscapes, towers,
