When I go out, to put my cap and gown on;
    With other regulations of the sort, meant
    For the just ordering of my comportment. 
    Which done, in less time than I can rehearse it, I
    Found myself member of the University!”

In pursuance of his plan for getting the best of everything, his father had chosen the best college, as far as he knew, that in which social and scholastic advantages were believed to be found in pre-eminent combination, and he had chosen what was thought to be the best position in the college; so that it was as gentleman-commoner of Christ Church that John Ruskin made his entrance into the academic world.

After matriculation, the Ruskins made a fortnight’s tour to Southampton and the coast, and returned to Herne Hill.  John went back to King’s College, and in December was examined in the subjects of his lectures.  He wrote to his father on Christmas Eve about the examination in English literature: 

“The students were numerous, and so were the questions; the room was hot, the papers long, the pens bad, the ink pale, and the interrogations difficult.  It lasted only three hours.  I wrote answers in very magnificent style to all the questions except three or four; gave in my paper and heard no more of the matter:  sic transeunt bore-ia mundi.”

He went on to mention his “very longitudinal essay,” which, since no other essays are reported in his letters about King’s College, must be the paper published in 1893, in answer to the question.  “Does the perusal of works of fiction act favourably or unfavourably on the moral character?”

At his farewell interview with Mr. Dale he was asked, as he writes to his father, what books he had read, and replied with a pretty long list, including Quintilian and Grotius.  Mr. Dale inquired what “light books” he was taking to Oxford:  “Saussure, Humboldt, and other works on natural philosophy and geology,” he answered.  “Then he asked if I ever read any of the modern fashionable novels; on this point I thought he began to look positive, so I gave him a negative, with the exception of Bulwer’s, and now and then a laughable one of the Theodore Hook’s or Captain Marryat’s.”  And so, with much excellent advice about exercise and sleep, and the way to win the Newdigate, he parted from Mr. Dale.

This Christmas was marked by his first introduction to the scientific world.  Mr. Charlesworth, of the British Museum, invited him to a meeting of the Geological Society (January 4, 1837), with promise of introduction to Buckland and Lyell.  The meeting, as he wrote, was “amusing and interesting, and very comfortable for frosty weather, as Mr. Murchison got warm and Mr. Greenau (sic) witty.  The warmth, however, got the better of the wit.”

The Meteorological Society also claimed his attention, and in this month he contributed a paper which “Richard [Fall] says will frighten them out of their meteorological wits, containing six close-written folio pages, and having, at its conclusion, a sting in its tail, the very agreeable announcement that it only commences the subject.”