VII. PAPA AND MAMMA 121

on the Alps. My fifteenth birthday gift being left to my choice, I asked for Saussure’s Voyages dans les Alpes,¹ and thenceforward began progressive work, carrying on my mineralogical dictionary by the help of Jameson’s three-volume Mineralogy, (an entirely clear and serviceable book;²) comparing his descriptions with the minerals in the British Museum, and writing my own more eloquent and exhaustive accounts in a shorthand of many ingeniously symbolic characters, which it took me much longer to write my descriptions in, than in common text, and which neither I nor anybody else could read a word of, afterwards.³

140. Such being the quadrilateral plan of my fortifiable dispositions, it is time now to explain, with such clue as I have found to them, the somewhat peculiar character and genius of both my parents; the influence of which was more important upon me, then, and far on into life, than any external conditions, either of friendship or tutorship, whether at the University, or in the world.

It was, in the first place, a matter of essential weight in the determination of subsequent lines, not only of labour but of thought, that while my father, as before told,⁴ gave me the best example of emotional reading,-reading, observe, proper; not recitation, which he disdained, and I disliked, -my mother was both able to teach me, and resolved that I should learn, absolute accuracy of diction and precision of accent in prose; and made me know, as soon as I could speak plain, what I have in all later years tried to enforce on my readers, that accuracy of diction means accuracy of sensation, and precision of accent, precision of feeling.⁵ Trained, herself in girlhood, only at Mrs. Rice’s

¹ [For Saussure as his “master in geology,” see the passages noted at Vol. XXVI. p. xix.]

² [Manual of Mineralogy, by Robert Jameson, F.R.S.E., Edinburgh, 1821.]

³ [A page of the “Dictionary,” begun about 1831, is here reproduced (from W.G. Collingwood’s Ruskin Relics, p. 171: for a note upon it, see the Introduction (above, p. lxxx.).]

⁴ [See above, p. 61.]

⁵ [See, for instance, on accuracy of diction, Lectures on Art, § 68 (Vol. XX. pp. 74, 75), and The Storm-Cloud, § 66 (Vol. XXXIV. p. 60); and on precision of accent, Modern Painters, vol. iv. (Vol. VI. p. 333), and Fors Clavigera, Letter 95 (Vol. XXIX. p. 501).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]