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a violent hater of the old Dutch school, and I imagine the first who told me that they were “sots, gamblers, and debauchees, delighting in the reality of the alehouse more than in its pictures.”¹ All which was awakening and beneficial to no small extent.

71. And so the year 1842 dawned for me, with many things in its morning cloud. In the early spring of it, a change came over Turner’s mind. He wanted to make some drawings to please himself; but also to be paid for making them. He gave Mr. Griffith fifteen sketches for choice of subject by any one who would give him a commission. He got commissions for nine, of which my father let me choose at first one, then was coaxed and tricked into letting me have two. Turner got orders, out of all the round world besides, for seven more. With the sketches, four finished drawings were shown for samples of the sort of thing Turner meant to make of them, and for immediate purchase by anybody.²

Among them was the “Splügen,” which I had some hope of obtaining by supplication, when my father, who was travelling, came home. I waited dutifully till he should come. In the meantime it was bought, with the loveliest Lake Lucerne, by Mr. Munro of Novar.

72. The thing became to me grave matter for meditation. In a story by Miss Edgeworth, the father would have come home in the nick of time, effaced Mr. Munro as he hesitated with the “Splügen” in his hand, and given the dutiful son that, and another. I found, after meditation, that Miss Edgeworth’s way was not the world’s, nor Providence’s. I perceived then, and conclusively, that if you do a foolish thing, you suffer for it exactly the same, whether you do it piously or not. I knew perfectly well that this drawing was the best Swiss landscape yet painted by man;

¹ [See J. D. Harding’s Principles and Practice of Art (1845), pp. 12, 21, 22, for his criticism of the Dutch school. Ruskin, however, does not quote the exact words either of Harding or of himself: for the latter, see such passages as Modern Painters, vol. iii. (Vol. V. p. 64); Vol. XII. p. 161; Vol. XVIII. p. 436.]

² [For a fuller account of these transactions, see the Epilogue to Ruskin’s Turner Notes of 1878: Vol. XIII. pp. 475-485.]

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