To readers who know the country it is interesting as giving a detailed account in the days when this “nook of English ground” was “secure from rash assault.”  One learns that, even then, there were jarring sights at Bowness Bay and along Derwentwater shore, elements unkind and bills exorbitant.  Coniston especially was dreary with rain, and its inn—­the old Waterhead, now destroyed—­extravagantly dear; “but,” says John, with his eye for mineral specimens, “it contains several rich coppermines.”  An interesting touch is the hero-worship with which they went reverently to peep at Southey and Wordsworth in church; too humble to dream of an introduction, and too polite to besiege the poets in their homes, but independent enough to form their own opinions on the personality of the heroes.  They did not like the look of Wordsworth at all; Southey they adored.  The dominant note of the tour is, however, an ecstatic delight in the mountain scenery; on Skiddaw and Helvellyn all the gamut of admiration is lavished.

On returning home, John began Greek under Dr. Andrews, and was soon versifying Anacreontics in his notebooks.  He began to read Byron for himself, with what result we shall see before long; but the most important new departure was the attempt to copy Cruikshank’s etchings to Grimm’s fairy tales, his real beginning at art.  From this practice he learnt the value of the pure, clean line that expresses form.  It is a good instance of the authority of these early years over Ruskin’s whole life and teaching that in his “Elements of Drawing” he advised young artists to begin with Cruikshank, as he began, and that he wrote appreciatively both of the stories and the etchings so many decades afterwards in the preface to a reprint by J.C.  Hotten.

His cousin-sister Mary had been sent to a day-school when Mrs. Ruskin’s lessons were superseded by Dr. Andrews, and she had learnt enough drawing to attempt a view of the hotel at Matlock, a thing which John could not do.  So, now that he too showed some power of neat draughtsmanship, it was felt that he ought to have her advantages.  They got Mr. Runciman the drawing-master, chosen, it may be, as a relative of the well-known Edinburgh artist of the same name, to give him lessons, in the early part of 1831.  His teaching was of the kind which preceded the Hardingesque:  it aimed at a bold use of the soft pencil, with a certain roundness of composition and richness of texture, a conventional “right way” of drawing anything.  This was hardly what John wanted; but, not to be beaten, he facsimiled the master’s freehand in a sort of engraver’s stipple, which his habitual neatness helped him to do in perfection.  Runciman soon put a stop to that, and took pains with a pupil who took such pains with himself—­taught him, at any rate, the principles of perspective, and remained his only drawing-master for several years.

A sample of John Ruskin’s early lessons in drawing, described by him in letters to his father, may be not without interest.  On February 20, 1832, he writes: