he settled into something different from either.

But Turner and Prout were not the only artists he knew; at Paris he
found his way into the Louvre, and got leave from the directors, though
he was under the age required, to copy. The picture he chose was a
Rembrandt.

Between this foreign tour and the next, his amusement was to draw these
vignettes, and to write the poems suggested by the scenes he had
visited. He had outgrown the evening lessons with Dr. Andrews, and as he
was fifteen, it was time to think more seriously of preparing him for
Oxford, where his name was put down at Christ Church. His father hoped
he would go into the Church, and eventually turn out a combination of a
Byron and a bishop--something like Dean Milman, only better. For this,
college was a necessary preliminary; for college, some little schooling.
So they picked the best day-school in the neighbourhood, that of the
Rev. Thomas Dale (afterwards Dean of Rochester), in Grove Lane, Peckham.
John Ruskin worked there rather less than two years. In 1835 he was
taken from school in consequence of an attack of pleurisy, and lost the
rest of that year from regular studies.

More interesting to him than school was the British Museum collection of
minerals, where he worked occasionally with his Jamieson's Dictionary.
By this time he had a fair student's collection of his own, and he
increased it by picking up specimens at Matlock, or Clifton, or in the
Alps, wherever he went, for he was not short of pocket-money. He took
the greatest pains over his catalogues, and wrote elaborate accounts of
the various minerals in a shorthand he invented out of Greek letters and
crystal forms.

Grafted on this mineralogy, and stimulated by the Swiss tour, was a new
interest in physical geology, which his father so far approved as to
give him Saussure's "Voyages dans les Alpes" for his birthday in 1834.
In this book he found the complement of Turner's vignettes, something
like a key to the "reason why" of all the wonderful forms and marvellous
mountain-architecture of the Alps. He soon wrote a short essay on the
subject, and had the pleasure of seeing it in print, in Loudon's
_Magazine of Natural History_ for March, 1834, along with another bit
of his writing, asking for information on the cause of the colour of the
Rhine-water.

He had already some acquaintance with J.C. Loudon, F.L.S., H.S., etc.,
and he was on the staff of that versatile editor not long afterwards