198 PRÆTERITA-I

of good sense, good family, and enlarged education; we both of us already lived in elements far external to the college quadrangle. He told me of the plains of Troy; a year or two afterwards I showed him, on his marriage journey, the path up the Montanvert;¹ and the friendship between us has never changed, but by deepening, to this day.

225. Of other friends, I had some sensible and many kind ones; an excellent college tutor;² and later on, for a private one, the entirely right-minded and accomplished scholar already named, Osborne Gordon. At the corner of the great quadrangle lived Dr. Buckland, always ready to help me,-or, a greater favour still, to be helped by me, in diagram drawing for his lectures. My picture of the granite veins in Trewavas Head, with a cutter weathering the point in a squall, in the style of Copley Fielding, still, I believe, forms part of the resources of the geological department. Mr. Parker, then first founding the Architectural Society,³ and Charles Newton,⁴ already notable in his intense and curious way of looking into things, were there to sympathize with me, and to teach me more accurately the study of architecture. Within eight miles were the pictures of Blenheim. In all ways, opportunities, and privileges, it was not conceivable that a youth of my age could have been placed more favourably-if only he had had the wit to know them, and the will to use them. Alas! there I stood-or tottered-partly irresolute, partly idiotic, in the midst of them: nothing that I can think of among men, or birds, or beasts, quite the image of

¹ [In 1846, at the end of August. Acland had visited the site of Troy a few years before; and published The Plains of Troy, illustrated by a Panoramic Drawing taken on the spot and a Map constructed after the latest survey: see J. B. Atlay’s Memoir of Henry Acland, p. 72.]

² [The Rev. W. L. Brown: see below, p. 200.]

³ [John Henry Parker (1806-1884), bookseller at Oxford; writer on architecture; first keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, 1870-1884. His works on the antiquities of Rome are referred to by Ruskin in Vol. XXIII. p. 99, and Vol. XXVII. pp. 356, 410.]

⁴ [For later reference to him, see ii. § 155 (p. 385).]

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