Some critics would say that Ruskin never really got his 'stuff' into 'shape' in ( D, 241): see, for example, Hilton, John Ruskin: The Early Years, p.75. There clearly is order in the text, indeed order of a rather over-ambitious kind, to the extent that the printed Synopsis of Contents resembles that of Locke and is the anxious work of a recent 'Oxford Graduate' wanting to present his credentials in something that looks more like an eighteenth-century treatise on aesthetics than a glorified pamphlet. But the manuscripts of Modern Painters I do give us further clues to rather hectic writing habits and intentions at this early stage in his career that resulted not only in the wonderful oxygenated prose of some of the passages in which he glories in nature or Turner, the drafts of which are now lost, but also in rather ponderous arguments and transitions in the first half of the book (see missing manuscripts of Modern Painters I).