accentuate those weaknesses of mind and will that made failures of so
many schemes for the public good. If Ruskin had been trained in the
English public schools he would have learned common sense in boyhood.
As it was, his father and mother shielded the boy in every way from
all contact with the world. Ruskin's father was a prosperous wine
merchant with much culture; his mother was a religious fanatic, whose
passion for the Bible imposed upon her boy the daily reading of the
Scriptures and the daily memorizing of scores of verses.

Such training in most cases causes a revolt against religion, but in
Ruskin's case it resulted in training his boyish ear to the cadences
of the Bible writers and in filling his mind with the sublime imagery
of the prophets, with the result that when he began to write he had
already formed a style, the richest and most varied of the last
century.

The boy was a mental prodigy, for he taught himself to read when four
years old, and at five he had devoured hundreds of books and was
already writing poems and plays. At ten, when he had his first tutor,
his knowledge was wide and he had become a passionate lover of natural
scenery, as well as no mean artist with pen and pencil. Scott's novels
and Byron's _Childe Harold_ formed much of his reading at a time when
most boys are content with the stories of Ballantyne or Mayne Reid.
The range of his mental activity until he entered Oxford at eighteen
was very wide. He was interested in mineralogy, meteorology,
mathematics, drawing and painting. What probably expanded his mind
more than all else was the education of travel. His father spent about
half his time journeying through England and the Continent in an
old-fashioned chaise and John always shared in these expeditions. At
Oxford he competed for the Newdigate prize in poetry, and after being
twice defeated won the coveted honor. He never gained any high
scholarship, but he received valuable training in writing.

There is no space here to chronicle more than a few of his many
activities after leaving college. He first came into prominence by his
passionate defense of the painter Turner against the art critics, and
his study of Turner led him to adopt art criticism as his life work.
At twenty-three years of age, when most youths are puzzled about their
vocation, Ruskin had completed the first volume of _Modern Painters_,
the publication of which gave him fame and made him a social lion in
London.