The drawings of Amboise, the coast of Genoa, and the Glacier des Bois, though published later, were made before he had exchanged fancy for fact; and they bear, on the face of them, the obvious marks of an unhealthy state of mind.

Harding, whose robust common-sense and breezy mannerism endeared him to the British amateur of his generation, was just the man to correct any morbid tendency.

He had religious views in sympathy with his pupil, and he soon inoculated Ruskin with his contempt for the minor Dutch school--those bituminous landscapes, so unlike the sparkling freshness that Harding's own water-colour illustrated, and those vulgar tavern scenes, painted, he declared, by sots who disgraced art alike in their works and in their lives.
Until this epoch, John Ruskin had found much that interested him in the Dutch and Flemish painters of the seventeenth century.

He had classed them all together as the school of which Rubens, Vandyck and Rembrandt were the chief masters, and those as names to rank with Raphael and Michelangelo and Velasquez.

He was a humorist, not without boyish delight in a good Sam-Wellerism, and so could be amused with the "drolls," until Harding appealed to his religion and morality against them.