Ready for work again, and in reasonable health of mind and body, John Ruskin sat down in his little study at Herne Hill in November, 1841, with his private tutor, Osborne Gordon.  There was eighteen months’ leeway to make up, and the dates of ancient history, the details of schematized Aristotelianism, soon slip out of mind when one is sketching in Italy.  But he was more serious now about his work, and aware of his deficiencies.  To be useful in the world, is it not necessary first to understand all possible Greek constructions?  So said the voice of Oxford; but our undergraduate was saved, both now and afterwards, from this vain ambition.  “I think it would hardly be worth your while,” said Gordon.

He could not now go in for honours, for the lost year had superannuated him.  So in April he went up for a pass.  In those times, when a pass-man showed unusual powers, they could give him an honorary class; not a high class, because the range of the examination was less than in the honour-school.  This candidate wrote a poor Latin prose, it seems; but his divinity, philosophy, and mathematics were so good that they gave him the best they could—­an honorary double fourth—­upon which he took his B.A. degree, and could describe himself as “A Graduate of Oxford.”

The continued weakness of his health kept him from taking steps to enter the Church; and his real interest in art was not crowded out even by the last studies for his examination.  While he was working with Gordon, in the autumn of 1841, he was also taking lessons from J.D.  Harding; and the famous study of ivy, his first naturalistic sketching, to which we must revert, must have been done a week or two before going up for his examination.

The lessons from Harding were a useful counter-stroke to the excessive and exaggerated Turnerism in which he had been indulging through his illness.  The drawings of Amboise, the coast of Genoa, and the Glacier des Bois, though published later, were made before he had exchanged fancy for fact; and they bear, on the face of them, the obvious marks of an unhealthy state of mind.  Harding, whose robust common-sense and breezy mannerism endeared him to the British amateur of his generation, was just the man to correct any morbid tendency.  He had religious views in sympathy with his pupil, and he soon inoculated Ruskin with his contempt for the minor Dutch school—­those bituminous landscapes, so unlike the sparkling freshness that Harding’s own water-colour illustrated, and those vulgar tavern scenes, painted, he declared, by sots who disgraced art alike in their works and in their lives.