keep their own child’s brain from over-pressure.  It is evident that they did their best to “keep him back”; they did not send him to school for fear of the excitement of competitive study.  His mother put him through the Latin grammar herself, using the old Adam’s manual which his father had used at Edinburgh High School.  Even this old grammar became a sort of sacred book to him; and when at last he went to school, and his English master threw the book back to him, saying, “that’s a Scotch thing,” the boy was shocked and affronted, as which of us would be at a criticism on our first instrument of torture?  He remembered the incident all his life, and pilloried the want of tact with acerbity in his reminiscences.

They could keep him from school, but they did not keep him from study.  The year 1828 saw the beginning of another great work, “Eudosia, a Poem on the Universe”; it was “printed” with even greater neatness and labour; but this, too, after being toiled at during the winter months, was dropped in the middle of its second “book.”  It was not idleness that made him break off such plans, but just the reverse—­a too great activity of brain.  His parents seem to have thought that there was no harm in this apparently quiet reading and writing.  They were extremely energetic themselves, and hated idleness.  They appear to have held a theory that their little boy was safe so long as he was not obviously excited; and to have thought that the proper way of giving children pocket-money was to let them earn it.  So they used to pay him for his literary labours; “Homer” was one shilling a page; “Composition,” one penny for twenty lines; “Mineralogy,” one penny an article.

The death of his aunt Jessie left a large family of boys and one girl to the care of their widowed father, and the Ruskins felt it their duty to help.  They fetched Mary Richardson away, and brought her up as a sister to their solitary son.  She was not so beloved as Jessie had been, but a good girl and a nice girl, four years older than John, and able to be a companion to him in his lessons and travels.  There was no sentimentality about his attachment to her, but a steady fraternal relationship, he, of course, being the little lord and master; but she was not without spirit, which enabled her to hold her own, and perseverance, which sometimes helped her to eclipse, for the moment, his brilliancy.  They learnt together, wrote their journals together, and shared alike with the scrupulous fairness which Mrs. Ruskin’s sensible nature felt called on to show.  And so she remained his sister, and not quite his sister, until she married, and after a very short married life died.

Another accession to the family took place in the same year (1828); the Croydon aunt, too, had died, and left a dear dog, Dash, a brown and white spaniel, which at first refused to leave her coffin, but was coaxed away, and found a happy home at Herne Hill, and frequent celebration in his young master’s verses.  So the family was now complete—­papa and mamma, Mary and John and Dash.  One other figure must not be forgotten, Nurse Anne, who had come from the Edinburgh home, and remained always with them, John’s nurse and then Mrs. Ruskin’s attendant, as devoted and as censorious as any old-style Scotch servant in a story-book.