All this of course developed the child’s precocity.  He was early suffered and even encouraged to compose verses;[2] by ten he had written a play, which has unfortunately been preserved.  The hot-house rearing which his parents believed in, and his facility in teaching himself, tended to make a regular course of schooling a mere annoyance; such schooling as he had did not begin till he was fifteen, and lasted less than two years, and was broken by illness.  But the chief effect of the sheltered life and advanced education to which he was subjected was to endow him with depth at the expense of breadth, and to deprive him of a possibly vulgar, but certainly healthy, contact with his kind, which, one must believe, would have checked a certain disposition in him to egotism, sentimentality, and dogmatic vehemence.  “The bridle and blinkers were never taken off me,” he writes.[3]

[Sidenote:  Student at Oxford.]

[Sidenote:  Traveling in Europe.]

At Oxford—­whither his cautious mother pursued him—­Ruskin seems to have been impressed in no very essential manner by curriculum or college mates.  With learning per se he was always dissatisfied and never had much to do; his course was distinguished not so much by erudition as by culture.  He easily won the Newdigate prize in poetry; his rooms in Christ Church were hung with excellent examples of Turner’s landscapes,—­the gift of his art-loving father,—­of which he had been an intimate student ever since the age of thirteen.  But his course was interrupted by an illness, apparently of a tuberculous nature, which necessitated total relaxation and various trips in Italy and Switzerland, where he seems to have been healed by walking among his beloved Alps.  For many years thereafter he passed months of his time in these two countries, accompanied sometimes by his parents and sometimes rather luxuriously, it seems, by valet and guide.

[Sidenote:  Career as an author begins.]

Meanwhile he had commenced his career as author with the first volume of Modern Painters, begun, the world knows, as a short defense of Turner, originally intended for nothing more than a magazine article.  But the role of art-critic and law-giver pleased the youth,—­he was only twenty-four when the volume appeared,—­and having no desire to realize the ambition of his parents and become a bishop, and even less to duplicate his father’s career as vintner, he gladly seized the opportunity thus offered him to develop his aesthetic vein and to redeem the public mind from its vulgar apathy thereby.  He continued his work on Modern Painters, with some intermissions, for eighteen years, and supplemented it with the equally famous Seven Lamps of Architecture in 1849, and The Stones of Venice in 1853.

[Sidenote:  Domestic troubles.]