410 PRÆTERITA-II

Bridget, John, William, George, and Charles. None left now but William of Croydon.¹

180. The Perth boys were all partly weak in constitution, and curiously inconsistent in elements of character, having much of their mother’s subtlety and sweetness mixed with a rather larger measure of their father’s tannin. The eldest, James, was unlike the other three,-more delicate in feature, and more tractable in temper. My father brought him up to London when he was one-or two-and-twenty, and put him into the counting-house to see what could be made of him: but, though perfectly well-behaved, he was undiligent and effectless-chiefly solicitous about his trousers and gloves. I remember him in his little room, the smaller of the two looking west at top of Herne Hill house, a pleasant, gentle, tall figure of a youth. He fell into rapid decline and died.

Nor long after him, the youngest brother, Andrew, who with fewer palpable follies, had less real faculty than the rest. He learnt farming under a good master in Scotland, and went out to Australia to prove his science; but after a short struggle with the earth of the other side of the world, rested beneath it.

181. The second brother, John, thus left the head of the family, was a stumpily made, snub-or rather knob-nosed, red-faced, bright-eyed, good-natured simpleton; with the most curiously subtle shrewdnesses, and obstinate faculties, excrescent through his simplicity. I believe he first tried to carry on his father’s business; not prospering in that, after some pause and little-pleased scrutiny of him, he was established by my father as a wine-agent in Glasgow, in which business and town he remained, in a shambling, hand-to-mouth manner, some thirty years, a torment to my father, of an extremely vexatious kind-all the more that he was something of a possession and vestige of his mother

¹ [Mr. William Richardson died shortly after this was written. Ruskin was planning with him at the time to make a joint gift to the Drawing School at Oxford in memory of their mothers.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]