38 PRÆTERITA-I

him shave; and was always allowed to come into his room in the morning (under the one in which I am now writing¹), to be the motionless witness of that operation. Over his dressing-table hung one of his own water-colour drawings, made under the teaching of the elder Nasmyth; I believe, at the High School of Edinburgh. It was done in the early manner of tinting, which, just about the time when my father was at the High School, Dr. Monro was teaching Turner;² namely, in grey under-tints of Prussian blue and British ink, washed with warm colour afterwards on the lights. It represented Conway Castle, with its Frith, and, in the foreground, a cottage, a fisherman, and a boat at the water’s edge.*

43. When my father had finished shaving, he always told me a story about this picture. The custom began without any initial purpose of his, in consequence of my troublesome curiosity whether the fisherman lived in the cottage, and where he was going to in the boat. It being settled, for peace’ sake, that he did live in the cottage, and was going in the boat to fish near the castle, the plot of the drama afterwards gradually thickened; and became, I believe, involved with that of the tragedy of Douglas, and of the Castle Spectre,³ in both of which pieces my father had performed in private theatricals, before my mother, and a select Edinburgh audience, when he was a boy of sixteen, and she, at grave twenty, a model housekeeper, and very scornful and religiously suspicious of theatricals. But she was never weary of telling me, in later years, how

* This drawing is still over the chimney-piece of my bedroom at Brantwood.⁴

¹ [That is, Ruskin’s old nursery; used by him as his study during Mr. and Mrs. Severn’s occupation of the house.]

² [Thomas Monro (1759-1833), physician and connoisseur; Turner’s early patron: see Vol. XIII. pp. 255, 405.]

³ [Douglas, by John Home (1757), a Scottish minister; the play so offended the Presbytery, that its author left the ministry. The Castle Spectre, by “Monk” Lewis, brought out at Drury Lane in 1798.]

⁴ [It was shown by Ruskin at the Fine Art Society in 1878: see Vol. XIII. p. 489. For a further notice of it, see Fors, Letter 54 (Vol. XXVIII. p. 347).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]