This, and the story in “Arachne,” how she let him touch the tea-kettle; and the reminiscences in “Praeterita” of playthings locked up, and a lone little boy staring at the water-cart and the pattern on the carpet—­all these give a gloomy impression of his mother, against which we must set the proofs of affection and kindliness shown in her letters.  In these we can see her anxiously nursing him through childish ailments, taking him out for his daily walk to Duppas Hill with a captain’s biscuit in her muff, for fear he should be hungry by the way; we hear her teaching him his first lessons, with astonishment at his wonderful memory, and glorying with Nurse Anne over his behaviour in church; and all these things she retails in gossiping letters to her husband, while Mr. Richard Gray gives two-year-old John “his first lesson on the flute, both sitting on the drawing-room floor, very deeply engaged.”  “I am sure,” she says, “there is no other love, no other feeling, like a mother’s towards her first boy when she loves his father;” and her pride in his looks, and precocity, and docility—­“I never met with a child of his age so sensible to praise or blame”—­found a justification in his passionate devotion to the man who was so dear to them both.

Though he was born in the thick of London, he was not City-bred.  His first three summers were spent in lodgings in Hampstead or Dulwich, then “the country.”  So early as his fourth summer he was taken to Scotland by sea to stay with his aunt Jessie, Mrs. Richardson of Perth.  There he found cousins to play with, especially one, little Jessie, of nearly his own age; he found a river with deep swirling pools, that impressed him more than the sea, and he found the mountains.  Coming home in the autumn, he sat for his full-length portrait to James Northcote, R.A., and being asked what he would choose for background, he replied, “Blue hills.”

Northcote had painted Mr. and Mrs. Ruskin, and, as they were fond of artistic company, remained their friend.  A certain friendship too, was struck up between the old Academician, then in his seventy-seventh year, the acknowledged cynic and satirist, and the little wise boy who asked shrewd questions, and could sit still to be painted; who, moreover, had a face worth painting, not unlike the model from whom Northcote’s master, the great Sir Joshua, had painted his famous cherubs.  The painter asked him to come again, and sit as the hero of a fancy picture, bought at the Academy by the flattered parents.  There is a grove, a flock of toy sheep, drapery in the grand style, a mahogany Satyr taking a thorn out of the little pink foot of a conventional nudity—­poor survivals of the Titianesque.  But the head is an obvious portrait, and a happy one; far more like the real boy, so tradition says, than the generalized chubbiness of the commissioned picture.