IV. UNDER NEW TUTORSHIPS 81

at Brantwood.¹ The drawing of that Hôtel de Ville by me now at Oxford² is a copy of Prout’s, which I made in illustration of the volume in which I wrote the beginning of a rhymed history of the tour.

For it had excited all the poor little faculties that were in me to their utmost strain, and I had certainly more passionate happiness, of a quality utterly indescribable to people who never felt the like, and more, in solid quantity, in those three months, than most people have in all their lives. The impressions of the Alps first seen from Schaffhausen, of Milan and of Geneva, I will try to give some account of afterwards,³-my first business now is to get on.⁴

91. The winter of ‘33, and what time I could steal to amuse myself in, out of ‘34, were spent in composing, writing fair, and drawing vignettes for the decoration of the aforesaid poetical account of our tour, in imitation of Rogers’s Italy. The drawings were made on separate pieces of paper and pasted into the books; many have since been taken out, others are there for which the verses were never written, for I had spent my fervour before I got up the Rhine. I leave the unfinished folly in Joanie’s care, that none but friends may see it.⁵

Meantime, it having been perceived by my father and mother that Dr. Andrews could neither prepare me for the University, nor for the duties of a bishopric, I was sent as a day scholar to the private school kept by the

¹ [This drawing was No. 9 in the Ruskin Exhibition at Manchester, 1904.]

² [Afterwards removed: see Ariadne Florentina, § 113 (Vol. XXII. pp. 368-9).]

³ [See below, pp. 113, 117, for Schaffhausen and Milan; and pp. 320 seq. for Geneva.]

⁴ [Here in the MS. was the following passage:-

“In returning by Paris, July or August 1833, I first saw, dining with them in the Champs Elysées (very literally), the daughters of my father’s Spanish partner Mr. Domecq. This year was the first of three which the astrologer Varley afterwards fixed on as having been especially fatal to me,-‘when you were 14, 17, and 21.’”

Ruskin a little lower down (p. 85), forgetting that he had struck out this passage, referred to this “fatal dinner.” For another reference to Varley, see below, p. 298 n.]

⁵ [It was ultimately included in the collection of Ruskin’s Poems in 1891: see now Vol. II. pp. 340-387. Examples of the vignettes are there given at pp. 356, 380.]

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