[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 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