howed unusual powers, they could give him an honorary class; not a high
class, because the range of the examination was less than in the
honour-school. This candidate wrote a poor Latin prose, it seems; but
his divinity, philosophy, and mathematics were so good that they gave
him the best they could--an honorary double fourth--upon which he took
his B.A. degree, and could describe himself as "A Graduate of Oxford."

The continued weakness of his health kept him from taking steps to enter
the Church; and his real interest in art was not crowded out even by the
last studies for his examination. While he was working with Gordon, in
the autumn of 1841, he was also taking lessons from J.D. Harding; and
the famous study of ivy, his first naturalistic sketching, to which we
must revert, must have been done a week or two before going up for his
examination.

The lessons from Harding were a useful counter-stroke to the excessive
and exaggerated Turnerism in which he had been indulging through his
illness. The drawings of Amboise, the coast of Genoa, and the Glacier
des Bois, though published later, were made before he had exchanged
fancy for fact; and they bear, on the face of them, the obvious marks of
an unhealthy state of mind. Harding, whose robust common-sense and
breezy mannerism endeared him to the British amateur of his generation,
was just the man to correct any morbid tendency. He had religious views
in sympathy with his pupil, and he soon inoculated Ruskin with his
contempt for the minor Dutch school--those bituminous landscapes, so
unlike the sparkling freshness that Harding's own water-colour
illustrated, and those vulgar tavern scenes, painted, he declared, by
sots who disgraced art alike in their works and in their lives.

Until this epoch, John Ruskin had found much that interested him in the
Dutch and Flemish painters of the seventeenth century. He had classed
them all together as the school of which Rubens, Vandyck and Rembrandt
were the chief masters, and those as names to rank with Raphael and
Michelangelo and Velasquez. He was a humorist, not without boyish
delight in a good Sam-Wellerism, and so could be amused with the
"drolls," until Harding appealed to his religion and morality against
them. He was a chiaroscurist, and not naturally offended by their
violent light and shade, until George Richmond showed him the more
excellent way in colour, the glow of Venice, first hinting it at Rome in
1840, and then