IV. UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS 79

I was ever supposed to show any talent for drawing. But on my thirteenth (?) birthday, 8th February, 1832, my father’s partner, Mr. Henry Telford, gave me Rogers’s Italy,¹ and determined the main tenor of my life.

At that time I had never heard of Turner, except in the well-remembered saying of Mr. Runciman’s, that “the world had lately been much dazzled and led away by some splendid ideas thrown out by Turner.” But I had no sooner cast eyes on the Rogers vignettes than I took them for my only masters, and set myself to imitate them as far as I possibly could by fine pen shading.

88. I have told this story so often that I begin to doubt its time. It is curiously tiresome that Mr. Telford did not himself write my name in the book, and my father, who writes in it, “The gift of Henry Telford, Esq.,” still more curiously, for him, puts no date: if it was a year later, no matter; there is no doubt however that early in the spring of 1833 Prout published his Sketches in Flanders and Germany. I well remember going with my father into the shop where subscribers entered their names, and being referred to the specimen print, the turreted window over the Moselle, at Coblentz.² We got the book home to Herne Hill before the time of our usual annual tour; and as my mother watched my father’s pleasure and mine in looking at the wonderful places, she said, why should not we go and see some of them in reality? My father hesitated a little, then with glittering eyes said-why not? And there were two or three weeks of entirely rapturous and amazed preparation. I recollect that very evening bringing down my big geography book, still most precious to me;³ (I take it down now, and for the first time put my own initials under my father’s name in it)-and looking with Mary at the outline of Mont Blanc,

¹ [As recorded above: see p. 29 n.]

² [Plate xvii. in the Sketches.]

³ [Geography, illustrated on a Popular Plan for the Use of Schools and Young Persons, with sixty-five Engravings. By the Rev. J. Goldsmith. London: 1820. The plate of Mont Blanc is opposite p. 201.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]