to his
father | by John Ruskin | 1829 Hernhill _(sic)_ Dulwich."

To this are appended, among other pieces, fair copies of "Skiddaw," and
"Derwentwater." A recast of these, touched up by some older hand, and
printed in _The Spiritual Times_ for February, 1830, may be called his
first appearance in type.

An illness of his postponed their tour for 1829, until it was too late
for more than a little journey in Kent. He has referred his earliest
sketching to this occasion, but it seems likely that the drawings
attributed to this year were done in 1831. He was, however, busy writing
poetry. At Tunbridge, for example, he wrote that fragment "On Happiness"
which catches so cleverly the tones of Young--a writer whose orthodox
moralizing suited with the creed in which John Ruskin was brought up,
alternating, be it remembered, with "Don Quixote."

Coming home, he began a new edition of his verses, on a more
pretentious scale than the old red books, in a fine bound volume,
exquisitely "printed," with the poems dated. This new energy seems to
have been roused by the gift from his Croydon cousin Charles, a clerk in
the publishing house of Smith, Elder, and Co., of their annual
"Friendship's Offering." Mrs. Ruskin, in a letter of October 31, 1829,
finds "the poetry very so-so"; but John evidently made the book his
model.

He was now growing out of his mother's tutorship, and during this autumn
he was put under the care of Dr. Andrews for his Latin. He relates the
introduction in "Praeterita," and, more circumstantially, in a letter of
the time, to Mrs. Monro, the mother of his charming Mrs. Richard Gray,
the indulgent neighbour who used to pamper the little gourmand with
delicacies unknown in severe Mrs. Ruskin's dining-room. He says in the
letter--this is at ten years old: "Well, papa, seeing how fond I was of
the doctor, and knowing him to be an excellent Latin scholar, got him
for me as a tutor, and every lesson I get I like him better and better,
for he makes me laugh 'almost, if not quite'--to use one of his own
expressions--the whole time. He is so funny, comparing Neptune's lifting
up the wrecked ships of AEneas with his trident to my lifting up a potato
with a fork, or taking a piece of bread out of a bowl of milk with a
spoon! And as he is always saying [things] of that kind, or relating
some droll anecdote, or explaining the part of Virgil (the book which I
am in) very nicely, I am always delighted when Mondays, Wednes