I. THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL 23

accidental conditions, of my childhood, entirely right, for a child of my temperament: but the mode of my introduction to literature appears to me questionable, and I am not prepared to carry it out in St. George’s schools, without much modification. I absolutely declined to learn to read by syllables; but would get an entire sentence by heart with great facility, and point with accuracy to every word in the page as I repeated it. As, however, when the words were once displaced, I had no more to say, my mother gave up, for the time, the endeavour to teach me to read, hoping only that I might consent, in process of years, to adopt the popular system of syllabic study. But I went on to amuse myself, in my own way, learnt whole words at a time, as I did patterns; and at five years old was sending for my “second volumes” to the circulating library.

18. This effort to learn the words in their collective aspect, was assisted by my real admiration of the look of printed type, which I began to copy for my pleasure, as other children draw dogs and horses. The following inscription,¹ facsimile’d from the fly-leaf of my Seven Champions of Christendom² (judging from the independent views taken in it of the character of the letter L, and the relative elevation of G,) I believe to be an extremely early art study of this class; and as by the will of Fors, the first lines of the note, written after an interval of fifty years, underneath my copy of it, in direction to Mr. Burgess,³ presented some notable points of correspondence with it, I thought it well he should engrave them together, as they stood.⁴

some friends to take him to the coffee-house which Dryden frequented. Sir Joshua Reynolds, when a youth, had touched the hand of Pope in a crowd. Northcote in 1762 touched the skirt of Sir Joshua’s coat, and lived to paint Ruskin’s portrait. (Boswell’s Life of Johnson, edited by G. B. Hill, 1887, vol. i. p. 377 n.).]

¹ [See p. 24.]

² [For this book, see Vol. XXIV. p. 246.]

³ [For Ruskin’s notice of his assistant, Arthur Burgess, see Vol. XIV. pp. 349-356.]

⁴ [For reflections on the character of the handwriting here displayed, see Fors, Letter 51 (Vol. XXVIII. p. 275).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]