family custom than anything else, and was accompanied by
undisguised admiration and patent pride. They were his stupefied
critics, when he read aloud his works in the family circle, and his
father obediently produced large sums of money to gratify his
brilliant son's artistic desire for the possession of Turner's
paintings. Ruskin in his morbid moments, in later life, turned
fiercely and unjustly against his fond and tender father. He
accused him with an in temperate bitterness of having lavished
everything upon him except the intelligent sympathy of which he
stood in need, and his father's gentle and mournful apologies have
an extraordinary beauty of puzzled and patient dignity about them.

When Ruskin went to Oxford, his mother went to reside there too, to
look after her darling. One might have supposed that this would
have involved Ruskin in ridicule, but he was petted and indulged by
his fellow-undergraduates, who found his charm, his swift wit, his
childlike waywardness, his freakish humour irresistible. Then he
had a serious illness, and his first taste of misery; he was afraid
of death, he hated the constraints of invalid life and the grim
interruption to his boundless energies and plans. Then came his
first great book, and he strode full-fledged into fame. His amazing
attractiveness, his talk, which combined incisiveness and fancy and
humour and fire and gentleness, made him a marked figure from the
first. Moreover, he had the command of great wealth, yet no
temptation to be idle. The tale of Ruskin's industry for the next
fifty years is one that would be incredible if it were not true.
His brief and dim experience of married life seems hardly to have
affected him. As a critic of art and ethics, as the writer of
facile magnificent sentences, full of beauty and rhythm, as the
composer of word-structures, apparently logical in form but deeply