“The faults of Turner are numerous, and perhaps more egregious than
     those of any other great existing artist; but if he has greater
     faults, he has also greater beauties.

“His imagination is Shakespearian in its mightiness.  Had the scene of ‘Juliet and her Nurse’ risen up before the mind of a poet, and been described in ‘words that burn,’ it had been the admiration of the world....  Many-coloured mists are floating above the distant city, but such mists as you might imagine to be ethereal spirits, souls of the mighty dead breathed out of the tombs of Italy into the blue of her bright heaven, and wandering in vague and infinite glory around the earth that they have loved.  Instinct with the beauty of uncertain light, they move and mingle among the pale stars, and rise up into the brightness of the illimitable heaven, whose soft, sad blue eye gazes down into the deep waters of the sea for ever—­that sea whose motionless and silent transparency is beaming with phosphor light, that emanates out of its sapphire serenity like bright dreams breathed into the spirit of a deep sleep.  And the spires of the glorious city rise indistinctly bright into those living mists, like pyramids of pale fire from some vast altar; and amidst the glory of the dream there is, as it were, the voice of a multitude entering by the eye, arising from the stillness of the city like the summer wind passing over the leaves of the forest, when a murmur is heard amidst their multitudes.

     “This, O Maga, is the picture which your critic has pronounced to
     be ’like models of different parts of Venice, streaked blue and
     white, and thrown into a flour-tub’!”

Before sending his reply to the editor of Blackwood, as had been intended, it was thought only right that Turner should be consulted.  The MS. was enclosed to his address in London, with a courteous note from Mr. John James Ruskin, asking his permission to publish.  Turner replied, expressing the scorn he felt for anonymous attacks, and jestingly hinting that the art-critics of the old Scotch school found their “meal-tub” in danger from his “flour-tub”; but “he never moved in such matters,” so he sent on the MS. to Mr. Munro of Novar, who had bought the picture.

Ten days or so after this episode John Ruskin was matriculated at Oxford (October 18, 1836).  He told the story of his first appearance as a gownsman in one of his gossiping letters in verse: 

    “A night, a day past o’er—­the time drew near—­
    The morning came—­I felt a little queer;
    Came to the push; paid some tremendous fees;
    Past; and was capped and gowned with marvellous ease. 
    Then went to the Vice-Chancellor to swear
    Not to wear boots, nor cut or comb my hair
    Fantastically—­to shun all such sins
    As playing marbles or frequenting inns;
    Always to walk with breeches black or brown on;