obvious usefulness of the analyses of natural form and
effect made many an artist read on, while he shook his head. Some
readily owned their obligation to the new teacher. Holland, for one,
wrote to Harrison that he meant to paint the better for the snubbing he
had got. Of such as reviewed the book adversely in _Blackwood_ and the
_Athenaeum_, not one undertook to refute it seriously. They merely
attacked a detail here and there, which the author discussed in two or
three replies, with a patience that showed how confident he was in his
position.

He had the good word of some of the best judges of literature. "Modern
Painters" lay on Rogers' table; and Tennyson, who a few years before had
beaten young Ruskin out of the field of poetry, was so taken with it
that he wrote to his publisher to borrow it for him, "as he longed very
much to see it," but could not afford to buy it. Sir Henry Taylor wrote
to Aubrey de Vere, the poet, begging him to read:

"A book which seems to me to be far more deeply founded in its
criticism of art than any other that I have met with ... written
with great power and eloquence, and a spirit of the most diligent
investigation.... I am told that the author's name is Ruskin, and
that he was considered at college as an odd sort of man who would
never do anything."

A second edition appeared within 12 months. When the secret of the
"Oxford Graduate" leaked out, as it did very soon, through the proud
father, Mr. John was lionized. During the winter of 1843 he met
celebrities at fashionable dinner-tables; and now that his parents were
established in their grander house on Denmark Hill,[1] they could duly
return the hospitalities of the great world.

[Footnote 1: To which they removed in October, 1842.]

It was one very satisfactory result of the success that the father was
more or less converted to Turnerism, and lined his walls with Turner
drawings, which became the great attraction of the house, far outshining
its seven acres of garden and orchard and shrubbery, and the ampler air
of cultured ease. For a gift to his son he bought "The Slave Ship," one
of Turner's latest and most disputed works; and he was all eagerness to
see the next volume in preparation.

It was intended to carry on the discussion of "Truth," with further
illustrations of mountain-form, trees and skies. And so in May, 1844,
they all went away again, that the artist-author might prepare drawin