Meantime his old nurse Anne (it is trivial, but a touch of nature), being at Oxford in attendance on the ladies, and keen, as she always was, for Master John’s success, heard from the keeper of the Reading-room of criticisms on his published verses.  She brought the news to his delighted mother.  “He was pleased,” she writes, “but says that he forms his own estimate of his poems, and reviews don’t alter it; but ‘How my father will be delighted!  How he will crow!’” Which historiette repeated itself many a time in the family annals.

In Lent term, 1838, he was hard at work on the new poem.  He wrote: 

“I must give an immense time every day to the Newdigate, which I must have, if study will get it.  I have much to revise.  You find many faults, but there are hundreds which have escaped your notice, and many lines must go out altogether which you and I should wish to stay in.  The thing must be remodelled, and I must finish it while it has a freshness on it, otherwise it will not be written well.  The old lines are hackneyed in my ears, even as a very soft Orleans plum, which your Jewess has wiped and re-wiped with the corner of her apron, till its polish is perfect, and its temperature elevated.”

In this March he got through his “Smalls.”

“Nice thing to get over; quite a joke, as everybody says when they’ve got through with the feathers on.  It’s a kind of emancipation from freshness—­a thing unpleasant in an egg, but dignified in an Oxonian—­very.  Lowe very kind; Kynaston ditto—­nice fellows—­urbane.  How they do frighten people!  There was one man all but crying with mere fear.  Kynaston had to coax him like a child.  Poor fellow! he had some reason to be afraid; did his logic shockingly.  People always take up logic because they fancy it doesn’t require a good memory, and there is nothing half so productive of pluck; they never know it.  I was very cool when I got into it; found the degree of excitement agreeable; nibbled the end of my pen and grinned at Kynaston over the table as if I had been going to pluck him.  They always smile when they mean pluck.”

The Newdigate for 1838, for all his care and pains, was won by Dart.  He was, at any rate, beaten by a friend, and with a poem which his own honourable sympathy and assistance had helped to perfect.

Another trifling incident lets us get a glimpse of the family life of our young poet.  The Queen’s coronation in June, 1838, was a great event to all the world, and Mr. Ruskin was anxious for his son to see it.  Much correspondence ensued between the parents, arranging everything for him, as they always did—­which of the available tickets should be accepted, and whether he could stand the fatigue of the long waiting, and so forth.  Mrs. Ruskin did not like the notion of her boy sitting perched on rickety scaffolding at dizzy altitudes in the Abbey.  Mr. Ruskin, evidently determined to carry his point,