Then came school-days.  His father had sent him to an old endowed school at Penrith, that he might be away from home and under discipline.  There he had received a plain commercial education, together with some Latin and Greek.  His quick, restless mind had soaked it all in; nothing had been a trouble to him; though, as he well knew, he had done nothing supremely well.  But Homer and Virgil had been unlocked for him; and in the school library he found Shakespeare and Chaucer, ‘Morte d’Arthur’ and ‘Don Quixote,’ fresh and endless material for his drawing, which never stopped.  Drawing everywhere—­on his books and slates, on doors and gate-posts, or on the whitewashed wall of the old Tudor school-room, where a hunt, drawn with a burned stick, and gloriously dominating the whole room, had provoked the indulgence, even the praise, of the headmaster.

And the old drawing-master!—­a German—­half blind, though he would never confess it—­who dabbled in oil-painting, and let the boy watch his methods.  How he would twirl his dirty brush round and dab down a lump of Prussian blue, imagining it to be sepia, hastily correcting it a moment afterwards with a lump of lake, and then say chuckling to himself:  ’By Gode, dat is fine!—­dat is very nearly a good purple.  Fenwick, my boy, mark me—­you vill not find a good purple no-vere!  Some-vere—­in de depths of Japanese art—­dere is a good purple.  Dat I believe.  But not in Europe.  Ve Europeans are all tam fools.  But I vill not svear!—­no!—­you onderstand, Fenwick; you haf never heard me svear?’ And then a round oath, smothered in a hasty fit of coughing.  And once he had cut off part of the skirt of his Sunday coat, taking it in his blindness for an old one, to clean his palette with; and it was thought, by the boys, that it was the unseemly result of this rash act, as disclosed at church the following Sunday morning, which had led to the poor old man’s dismissal.

But from him John had learnt a good deal about oil-painting—­something too of anatomy—­though more of this last from that old book—­Albinus, was it?—­that he had found in his father’s stock.  He could see himself lying on the floor—­poring over the old plates, morning, noon, and night—­then using a little lad, his father’s apprentice, to examine him in what he had learnt—­the two going about arm-in-arm—­Backhouse asking the questions according to a paper drawn up by John—­’How many heads to the deltoid?’—­and so on—­over and over again—­and with what an eagerness, what an ardour!—­till the brain was bursting and the hand quivering with new knowledge—­and the power to use it.  Then Leonardo’s ‘Art of Painting’ and Reynolds’s Discourses’—­both discovered in the shop, and studied incessantly, till the boy of eighteen felt himself the peer of any Academician, and walked proudly down the Kendal streets, thinking of the half-finished paintings in his garret at home, and of the dreams, the conceptions, the ambitions of which that garret had already been the scene.