have been roused by the gift from his Croydon cousin Charles, a clerk in
the publishing house of Smith, Elder, and Co., of their annual
"Friendship's Offering." Mrs. Ruskin, in a letter of October 31, 1829,
finds "the poetry very so-so"; but John evidently made the book his
model.

He was now growing out of his mother's tutorship, and during this autumn
he was put under the care of Dr. Andrews for his Latin. He relates the
introduction in "Præterita," and, more circumstantially, in a letter of
the time, to Mrs. Monro, the mother of his charming Mrs. Richard Gray,
the indulgent neighbour who used to pamper the little gourmand with
delicacies unknown in severe Mrs. Ruskin's dining-room. He says in the
letter--this is at ten years old: "Well, papa, seeing how fond I was of
the doctor, and knowing him to be an excellent Latin scholar, got him
for me as a tutor, and every lesson I get I like him better and better,
for he makes me laugh 'almost, if not quite'--to use one of his own
expressions--the whole time. He is so funny, comparing Neptune's lifting
up the wrecked ships of Æneas with his trident to my lifting up a potato
with a fork, or taking a piece of bread out of a bowl of milk with a
spoon! And as he is always saying [things] of that kind, or relating
some droll anecdote, or explaining the part of Virgil (the book which I
am in) very nicely, I am always delighted when Mondays, Wednesdays, and
Fridays are come."

Dr. Andrews was no doubt a genial teacher, and had been a scholar of
some distinction in his University of Glasgow; but Mrs. Ruskin thought
him "flighty," as well she might, when, after six months' Greek, he
proposed (in March, 1831) to begin Hebrew with John. It was a great
misfortune for the young genius that he was not more sternly drilled at
the outset, and he suffered for it through many a long year of