I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL 15

to me-I observed that they not only did more, but in proportion to their doings got less, than other people-nay, that the best of them were even ready to govern for nothing! and let their followers divide any quantity of spoil or profit. Of late it has seemed to me that the idea of a king has become exactly the contrary of this, and that it has been supposed the duty of superior persons generally to govern less, and get more, than anybody else.¹ So that it was, perhaps, quite as well that in those early days my contemplation of existent kingship was a very distant one.

4. The aunt who gave me cold mutton on Sundays was my father’s sister:² she lived at Bridge-end, in the town of Perth, and had a garden full of gooseberry-bushes, sloping down to the Tay, with a door opening to the water, which ran past it, clear-brown over the pebbles three or four feet deep; swift-eddying,-an infinite thing for a child to look down into.

5. My father began business as a wine-merchant, with no capital, and a considerable amount of debts bequeathed him by my grandfather.³ He accepted the bequest, and paid them all before he began to lay by anything for himself,-for which his best friends called him a fool, and I, without expressing any opinion as to his wisdom, which I knew in such matters to be at least equal to mine, have written on the granite slab over his grave that he was “an entirely honest merchant.”⁴ As days went on he was able to take a house in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, No. 54,⁵ (the windows of it, fortunately for me, commanded a view of a marvellous iron post, out of which

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¹ [Compare Fors Clavigera, Letter 22 (Vol. XXVII. p. 384), where Ruskin refers to this passage (which appeared originally in Fors, Letter 10, § 4).]

[note]² [Jessie Ruskin, who married Peter Richardson, of Perth. The sisters both of Ruskin’s father and of his mother married Richardsons, no relations to each other: see ii. § 179). For further notice of Jessie of Perth, see below, chaps. iii. and iv.; pp. 62, 65, 70.]

³ [For this John Thomas Ruskin, of Edinburgh (1761-1817?), see the Introduction, above, p. lix.]

⁴ [The inscription is printed in Vol. XVII. p. lxxvii.]

⁵ [The house now bears a tablet recording Ruskin’s birth there.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]