an introduction to the painter, whom he met when he was
next in town, at Mr. Griffith's house. He knew well enough the popular
idea of Turner as a morose and niggardly, inexplicable man. As he had
seen faults in Turner's painting, so he was ready to acknowledge the
faults in his character. But while the rest of the world, with a very
few exceptions, dwelt upon the faults, Ruskin had penetration to discern
the virtues which they hid. Few passages in his autobiography are more
striking than the transcript from his journal of the same evening,
recording his first impression:

"'I found in him a somewhat eccentric, keen-mannered,
matter-of-fact, English-minded--gentleman; good-natured evidently,
bad-tempered evidently, hating humbug of all sorts, shrewd, perhaps
a little selfish, highly intellectual, the powers of the mind not
brought out with any delight in their manifestation, or intention
of display, but flashing out occasionally in a word or a look.'
Pretty close that," he adds later, "and full, to be set down at the
first glimpse, and set down the same evening."

Turner was not a man to make an intimate of, all at once; the
acquaintanceship continued, and it ripened into as close a confidence as
the eccentric painter's habits of life permitted. He seems to have been
more at home with the father than with the son; but even when the young
man took to writing books about him, he did not, as Carlyle is reported
to have done in a parallel case, show his exponent to the door.

The occasion of John Ruskin's coming to town this time was not a
pleasant one--nothing less than the complete breakdown of his health. It
is true that he was working very hard during this spring; but hard
reading does not of itself kill people, only when it is combined with
real and prolonged mental distress, acting upon a sensitive temperament.
The case was thought serious; reading was stopped, and the patient was
ordered abroad for the winter.

For that summer there was no hurry to be gone; rest was more needed than
change, at first. Late in September the same family-party crossed the
sea to Calais. How different a voyage for them all from the merry
departures of bygone Maytides! Which way should they turn? Not to Paris,
for _there_ was the cause of all these ills; so they went straight
southwards, through Normandy to the Loire, and saw the chateaux and
churches from Orleans to Tours, famous for their Rena