They waited to keep papa’s birthday on May 10, and early next morning drove off—­father and mother, John and Mary, Nurse Anne, and the courier Salvador.  They crossed to Calais, and posted, as people did in the old times, slowly from point to point; starting betimes, halting at the roadside inns, where John tried to snatch a sketch, reaching their destination early enough to investigate the cathedral or the citadel, monuments of antiquity or achievements of modern civilisation, with impartial eagerness; and before bedtime John would write up his journal and work up his sketches just as if he were at home.

So they went through Flanders and Germany, following Prout’s lead by the castles of the Rhine; but at last, at Schaffhausen one Sunday evening—­“suddenly—­behold—­beyond!”—­they had seen the Alps.  Thenceforward Turner was their guide as they crossed the Spluegen, sailed the Italian lakes, wondered at Milan Cathedral, and the Mediterranean at Genoa, and then roamed through the Oberland and back to Chamouni.  All this while a great plan shaped itself in the boy’s head, no less than to make a Rogers’ “Italy” for himself, just as he tried to make a “Harry and Lucy” or a “Dictionary of Minerals.”  On every place they passed he would write verses and prose sketches, to give respectively the romance and the reality or ridicule; for he saw the comic side of it all, keenly; and he would illustrate the series with Turneresque vignettes, drawn with the finest crowquill pen, to imitate the delicate engravings.  By this he learnt more drawing in two or three years than most amateur students do in seven.  For the first year he had the “Watchtower of Andernach” and the “Jungfrau from Interlaken” to show, with others of similar style, and thenceforward alternated between Turner and Prout, until he settled into something different from either.

But Turner and Prout were not the only artists he knew; at Paris he found his way into the Louvre, and got leave from the directors, though he was under the age required, to copy.  The picture he chose was a Rembrandt.

Between this foreign tour and the next, his amusement was to draw these vignettes, and to write the poems suggested by the scenes he had visited.  He had outgrown the evening lessons with Dr. Andrews, and as he was fifteen, it was time to think more seriously of preparing him for Oxford, where his name was put down at Christ Church.  His father hoped he would go into the Church, and eventually turn out a combination of a Byron and a bishop—­something like Dean Milman, only better.  For this, college was a necessary preliminary; for college, some little schooling.  So they picked the best day-school in the neighbourhood, that of the Rev. Thomas Dale (afterwards Dean of Rochester), in Grove Lane, Peckham.  John Ruskin worked there rather less than two years.  In 1835 he was taken from school in consequence of an attack of pleurisy, and lost the rest of that year from regular studies.