In the afternoon his careful mother would turn him out for a tramp round the Norwood lanes; he might look in at the Poussins and Claudes of the Dulwich Gallery, or, for a longer excursion, go over to Mr. Windus, and his roomful of Turner drawings, or sit to George Richmond for the portrait at full length with desk and portfolio, and Mont Blanc in the background.  Dinner over, another hour or two’s writing, and early to bed, after finishing his chapter with a flourish of eloquence, to be read next morning at breakfast to father and mother and Mary.  The vivid descriptions of scenes yet fresh in their memory, or of pictures they treasured, the “thoughts” as they used to be called, allusions to sincere beliefs and cherished hopes, never failed to win the praise that pleased the young writer most, in happy tears of unrestrained emotion.  These old-fashioned folk had not learnt the trick of nil admirari. Quite honestly they would say, with the German musician, “When I hear good music, then must I always weep.”

We can look into the little study and see what this writing was that went on so busily and steadily.  It was the long-meditated defence of Turner, provoked by Blackwood’s Magazine six years before, encouraged by Carlyle’s “Heroes,” and necessitated by the silence, on this topic, of the more enlightened leaders of thought in an age of connoisseurship and cant.

And as the winter ran out, he was ending his work, happy in the applause of his little domestic circle, and conscious that he was preaching the crusade of Sincerity, the cause of justice for the greatest landscape artist of any age, and justice, at the hands of a heedless public, for the glorious works of the supreme Artist of the universe.  Let our young painters, he concluded, go humbly to Nature, “rejecting nothing, selecting nothing, and scorning nothing,” in spite of Academic theorists, and in time we should have a school of landscape worthy of the inspiration they would find.

There was his book; the title of it, “Turner and the Ancients.”  Before publishing, to get more experienced criticism than that of the breakfast-table, he submitted it to his friend, W.H.  Harrison.  The title, it seemed, was not explicit enough, and after debate they substituted “Modern Painters:  their Superiority in the Art of Landscape Painting to all the Ancient Masters proved by Examples of the True, the Beautiful, and the Intellectual, from the Works of Modern Artists, especially from those of J.M.W.  Turner, Esq., R.A.”  And as the severe tone of many remarks was felt to be hardly supported by the age and standing of so young an author, he was content to sign himself “A Graduate of Oxford.”  The book was spoken of, but no part of the copy shown, to John Murray, who said he would prefer something about German art.  It found immediate acceptance with Messrs. Smith and Elder.  Young Ruskin had been doing business for seven years past with that firm; he was well known to them as one of the most “rising” youths of the time, and their own literary editor, Mr. Harrison, was his private Mentor, who revised his proofs and inserted the punctuation, which he usually indicated only by dashes.  His dealings with the publishers were generally conducted through his father, who made very fair terms for him, as things went then.