“I used to do pretty well as long as we went straight, and then get thinking of something and fall off as we turned a corner. I might have got some inkling of a seat in heaven’s good time, if no fuss had been made about me, nor inquiries instituted whether I had been off or on; but as my mother the moment I got home made searching scrutiny into the day’s disgraces, I merely got more nervous and helpless after every tumble; and this branch of my education was at last abandoned, my parents consoling themselves as best they might, in the conclusion that my not being able to learn to ride was the sign of my being a singular genius.” =Ruskin’s Indictment of the Limitations of his Condition.=—Ruskin suffered from the malady of his condition. He was of the suburban dwellers of the rich middle class who think, not wisely but too much, about the bringing up of their children, who choke a good deal of life with care and coddling, and are apt to be persuaded that their children want no outlets but such as it occurs to them to provide. Suburban life is a necessity, but it is also a misfortune, because, in a rich suburb, people live too much with their own sort. They are cut off from the small and the great, from labour, adventure, and privation. Let me recommend all rich educated parents who live in suburbs to read _Præterita_. With all his chivalrous loyalty to his parents, Ruskin has left here a grave indictment, not of them, but of the limitations of his condition. One hears the cry of the child, like that of Laurence Sterne’s caged starling—‘I can’t get out, I can’t get out’—repeated from page to page. You will say, whatever were the faults of his education, _Ruskin_ emerged from it, such as it was; and _we_ look for no more. But it is not for us to say how much greater an apostle among men even Ruskin would have become had he been allowed his right of free living as a child. And it may be, on the other hand, safe to admit that not every child, born and bred in a villa, will certainly be another Ruskin! We cannot follow Mr Ruskin further in the setting up of the dynamic relations proper to him, because his parents forbade, and nothing happened. His mother, he says, ‘never allowed me to go to the edge of a pond or be in the same field with a pony.’ But he notes ‘with thankfulness the good I got out of the tadpole-haunted ditch in Croxted Lane.’ Camberwell Green had a pond, and, he says, ‘it was one of the most valued privileges of my early life to be permitted by my nurse to contemplate this judicial pond with awe from the other side of the way.’