The year 1829 marked an advance in poetical composition.  For his father’s birthday he made a book more elaborate than any, sixteen pages in a red cover, with a title-page quite like print:  “Battle of Waterloo | a play | in two acts | with other small | Poems dedicated to his father | by John Ruskin | 1829 Hernhill (sic) Dulwich.”

To this are appended, among other pieces, fair copies of “Skiddaw,” and “Derwentwater.”  A recast of these, touched up by some older hand, and printed in The Spiritual Times for February, 1830, may be called his first appearance in type.

An illness of his postponed their tour for 1829, until it was too late for more than a little journey in Kent.  He has referred his earliest sketching to this occasion, but it seems 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 catches so cleverly the tones of Young—­a writer whose orthodox moralizing suited with the creed in which John Ruskin was brought up, alternating, be it remembered, with “Don Quixote.”

Coming home, he began a new edition of his verses, on a more pretentious scale than the old red books, in a fine bound volume, exquisitely “printed,” with the 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., of their annual “Friendship’s Offering.”  Mrs. Ruskin, in a letter of October 31, 1829, finds “the poetry very so-so”; but John evidently made the book his model.

He was now growing out of his mother’s tutorship, and during this autumn he was put under the care of Dr. Andrews for his Latin.  He relates the introduction in “Praeterita,” and, more circumstantially, in a letter of the time, to Mrs. Monro, the mother of his charming Mrs. Richard Gray, the indulgent neighbour who used to pamper the little gourmand with delicacies unknown in severe 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 Neptune’s lifting up the wrecked ships of AEneas with his trident to my lifting up a potato with a fork, or taking a piece of bread out of a bowl of milk with a spoon!  And as he is always saying [things] of that kind, or relating some droll anecdote, or explaining the part of Virgil (the book which I am in) very nicely, I am always delighted when Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are come.”

Dr. Andrews was no doubt a genial teacher, and had been a scholar of some distinction in his University of Glasgow; but Mrs. Ruskin thought him “flighty,” 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 young genius that he was not more sternly drilled at the outset, and he suffered for it through many a long year of struggles with deficient scholarship.