y, strict as they were
within their own lines, permitted her most of the enjoyments and
amusements of life; still less was there any cynicism or misanthropy.
But she devoted herself to her husband and son. She was too proud to
court those above her in worldly rank, and she was not easily approached
except by people fully equal to her in strength of character, of whom
there could never be many. The few who made their way to her friendship
found her a true and valuable friend.

CHAPTER II

THE FATHER OF THE MAN (1819-1825)

Into this family John Ruskin was born on February 8, 1819, at half-past
seven in the morning. He was baptised on the twentieth by the Rev. Mr.
Boyd.

The first account of him in writing is in a letter from his mother when
he was six weeks old. She chronicles--not without a touch of
superstition--the breaking of a looking-glass, and continues: "John
grows finely; he is just now on my knees sleeping and looking so
sweetly; I hope I shall not get proud of him." He was a fine healthy
baby, and at four months was "beginning to give more decided proofs that
he knows what he wants, and will have it if crying and passion will get
it." At a year his mother resolves that "this will be cured by a good
whipping when he can understand what it is," and we know that she
carried out her Spartan resolve.

This, and the story in "Arachne," how she let him touch the tea-kettle;
and the reminiscences in "Praeterita" of playthings locked up, and a lone
little boy staring at the water-cart and the pattern on the carpet--all
these give a gloomy impression of his mother, against which we must set
the proofs of affection and kindliness shown in her letters. In these we
can see her anxiously nursing him through childish ailments, taking him
out for his daily walk to Duppas Hill with a captain's biscuit in her
muff, for fear he should be hungry by the way; we hear her teaching him
his first lessons, with astonishment at his wonderful memory, and
glorying with Nurse Anne over his behaviour in church; and all these
things she retails in gossiping letters to her husband, while Mr.
Richard Gray gives two-year-old John "his first lesson on the flute,
both sitting on the drawing-room floor, very deeply engaged." "I am
sure," she says, "there is no other love, no other feeling, like a
mother's towards her first boy when she loves his father;" and her pride
in his looks, and precocity, and docility--"I never met with a chi