CHAPTER III

THE BANKS OF TAY

60. THE reader has, I hope, observed that in all I have hitherto said, emphasis has been laid only on the favourable conditions which surrounded the child whose history I am writing, and on the docile and impressionable quietness of its temper.

No claim has been made for it to any special power or capacity; for, indeed, none such existed, except that patience in looking, and precision in feeling, which afterwards, with due industry, formed my analytic power.

In all essential qualities of genius, except these, I was deficient; my memory only of average power. I have literally never known a child so incapable of acting a part, or telling a tale. On the other hand, I have never known one whose thirst for visible fact was at once so eager and so methodic.

61. I find also that in the foregoing accounts, modest as I meant them to be, higher literature is too boastfully spoken of as my first and exclusive study. My little Pope’s Iliad, and, in any understanding of them, my Genesis and Exodus, were certainly of little account with me till after I was ten. My calf milk of books was, on the lighter side, composed of Dame Wiggins of Lee,¹ the Peacock at Home, and the like nursery rhymes; and on the graver side, of Miss Edgeworth’s Frank, and Harry

¹ [Edited by Ruskin in the year (1885) in which this chapter appeared: see Vol. II. pp. 518-526. The Peacock “at Home,” by “A Lady” (Mrs. Dorset), a little book of rhymes with coloured pictures, was issued about 1810, and was already in its 26th edition in 1812.]

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