sights of the places they passed through--colleges and churches,
galleries and parks, ruins, castles, caves, lakes, and mountains--and
seeing them all, not listlessly, but with keen interest, noting
everything, inquiring for local information, looking up books of
reference, setting down the results, as if they had been meaning to
write a guide-book and gazetteer of Great Britain. _They_, I say, did
all this, for as soon as the boy could write, he was only imitating his
father in keeping his little journal of the tours, so that all he
learned stayed by him, and the habit of descriptive writing was formed.

In 1823 they seem to have travelled only through the south and
south-west; in 1824 they pushed north to the lakes, stayed awhile at
Keswick, and while the father went about his business, the child was
rambling with his nurse on Friar's Crag, among the steep rocks and
gnarled roots, which suggested, even at that age, the feelings expressed
in one of the notable passages in "Modern Painters." Thence they went on
to Scotland, and revisited their relatives at Perth. In 1825 they took a
more extended tour, and spent a few weeks in Paris, partly for the
festivities at the coronation of Charles X., partly for business
conference with Mr. Domecq, who had just been appointed wine-merchant to
the King of Spain. Thence they went to Brussels and the field of
Waterloo, of greater interest than the sights of Paris to six-year-old
John, who often during his boyhood celebrated the battle, and the heroes
of the battle, in verse.

Before he was quite three he used to climb into a chair and preach.
There is nothing so uncommon in that. Of Robert Browning, his neighbour
and seven-years-older contemporary, the same tale is told. But while the
incident that marks the baby Browning is the aside, _à propos_ of a
whimpering sister, "Pew-opener, remove that child," the baby Ruskin is