It was natural that a rising man, so closely connected with Scotland, should be welcomed by the leaders of the Scottish school of literature. Sydney Smith, a former Edinburgh professor, had praised the new volume. John Murray, as it seems from letters of the period, made overtures to secure the author as a contributor to his Italian guide-books. Lockhart employed him to write for the _Quarterly Review_. Lockhart was a person of great interest for young Ruskin, who worshipped Scott; and Lockhart's daughter, even without her personal charm, would have attracted him as the actual grandchild of the great Sir Walter. It was for her sake, he says, rather than for the honour of writing in the famous _Quarterly_, that he undertook to review Lord Lindsay's "Christian Art." He was known to be a suitor for Miss Lockhart's hand. His father, in view of the success he desired, had been in February looking out for a house in the Lake District; hoping, no doubt, to see him settled there as a sort of successor to Wordsworth and Christopher North. In March, John Ruskin betook himself to the Salutation at Ambleside, with his constant attendant and amanuensis George, for quiet after a tiring winter in London society, and for his new labour of reviewing. But he did not find himself so fond of the Lakes as of old. He wrote to his mother (Sunday, March 28, 1847): "I finished--and sealed up--and addressed--my last bit of work, last night by ten o'clock--ready to send by to-day's post--so that my father should receive it with this. I could not at all have done it had I stayed at home: for even with all the quiet here, I have had no more time than was necessary. For exercise, I find the rowing very useful, though it makes me melancholy with thinking of 1838,--and the lake, when it is quite calm, is wonderfully sad and quiet:--no bright colours--no snowy peaks. Black water--as still as death;--lonely, rocky islets--leafless woods,--or worse than leafless--the brown oak foliage hanging dead upon them; gray sky;--far-off, wild, dark, dismal moorlands; no sound except the rustling of the boat among the reeds. "_One o'clock._--I have your kind note and my father's, and am very thankful that you like what I have written, for I did not at all know myself whether it were good or bad." In the early summer he went to Oxford, for a meeting of the British Association. He said (June 27, 1847):