III. THE BANKS OF TAY 57

of a didactic character, with observations on the ignorant and unreflective dispositions of certain people.

“But those that do not know about that light,

Reflect not on it; and in all that light,

Not one of all the colours do they know.”

64. It was only, I think, after my seventh year had been fulfilled in these meditations, that my mother added the Latin lesson to the Bible-reading, and accurately established the daily routine which was sketched in the foregoing chapter.¹ But it extremely surprises me, in trying, at least for my own amusement, if not the reader’s, to finish the sketch into its corners, that I can’t recollect now what used to happen first in the morning, except breakfasting in the nursery, and if my Croydon cousin Bridget happened to be staying with us, quarrelling with her which should have the brownest bits of toast. That must have been later on, though, for I could not have been promoted to toast at the time I am thinking of. Nothing is well clear to me of the day’s course, till, after my father had gone to the City by the coach, and my mother’s household orders been quickly given, lessons began at half-past nine, with the Bible readings above described, and the two or three verses to be learned by heart, with a verse of paraphrase;-then a Latin declension or a bit of verb, and eight words of vocabulary from Adam’s Latin Grammar, (the best that ever was,²) and the rest of the day was my own. Arithmetic was wholesomely remitted till much later;³ geography I taught myself fast enough in my own way; history was never thought of, beyond what I chose to read of Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather. Thus, as aforesaid, by noon I was in the garden on fine days, or left to my own amusements on wet ones; of which I have farther at once to note that nearly as soon as I could crawl, my toy-bricks

¹ [See above, p. 42.]

² [For other allusions to the book, see below, pp. 83, 460.]

³ [Compare what Ruskin says in Fors Clavigera, Letters 94 and 95 (Vol. XXIX. pp. 479, 503).]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]