The enclosed having come into my hands being a Letter written by my Son to a Literary gentleman who had lent him a Work of Dr. Croly containing some remarks on your Rel Deluv, I having thought it might amuse you to see the Zeal of one of your Disciples, & therefore take the liberty of sending it, but I have a twofold motive believing that should your leisure ever allow of your glancing at the paper you might have an estimate of my Sons Knowledge of the Science he takes such delight in & aid him the more easily by occasional hints which the Intercourse so indulgently granted him by you may afford him the means of deriving.

Among the surprising omissions from Rus-kin's autobiography Praeterita is any substantial analysis of the critical debate over the art of J. M. W. Turner which led Ruskin to write Modern Painters in 1843. The autobiography merely tells us that in 1836, when Ruskin was just seventeen years old, he had been aroused to a pitch of “black anger” by a review in Blackwood's of Turner's pictures, and that he had remained in this mood “pretty nearly ever since.” This ribald review, Ruskin adds, expressed “the feelings of the pupils of Sir George Beaumont at the appearance of these unaccredited views of Nature.” We learn only from his correspondence that it was a similar review in 1842 which made him resolve to write a pamphlet that would “blow the critics out of the water.”

An unpublished diary which Ruskin kept during the summer of 1842 when he was conceiving the plan of Modern Pointers furnishes new information on the development of his mind at that time. Writing of this year in Praeterita, Raskin was obliged to rely on a memory weakened by age and disease. “To my sorrow, and supreme surprise,” he noted in his autobiography which he had begun in 1885, “I find no diary whatever of the feelings or discoveries of this year.” He apparently had forgotten that in 1872 he had given such a diary as a Christmas present to his American friend, Charles Eliot Norton. This important manuscript, which remained in the Norton family until 1936 and was then donated to the Yale University Library as a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Whitredge, seems to have been unknown to Ruskin's editors and succeeding students of his ideas. As reliable and recent a work as Derrick Leon's biography of Ruskin makes no mention of it and follows instead the account of the events of 1842 offered in Praeterita. A comparison of the manuscript with Praeterita shows that Ruskin's memory had dramatized this year of his youth in a way that misrepresented the state of mind in which Modern Painters was begun.