e life of Ruskin these two forces tending
respectively toward the love of beauty and toward the contempt of mere
beauty. They are, indeed, present from the beginning. He inherited
from his Scotch parents that upright fearlessness which has always
characterized the race. His stern mother "devoted him to God before he
was born,"[1] and she guarded her gift with unremitting but perhaps
misguided caution. The child was early taught to find most of his
entertainment within himself, and when he did not, he was whipped. He
had no playmates and few toys. His chief story-book was the Bible,
which he read many times from cover to cover at his mother's knee.
His father, the "perfectly honest wine-merchant," seems to have been
the one to foster the boy's aesthetic sense; he was in the habit of
reading aloud to his little family, and his son's apparently genuine
appreciation of Scott, Pope, and Homer dates from the incredibly early
age of five. It was his father, also, to whom he owed his early
acquaintance with the finest landscape, for the boy was his companion
in yearly business trips about Britain, and later visited, in his
parents' company, Belgium, western Germany, and the Alps.

[Sidenote: Early education.]

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