180 (no. 179 omitted). Account of a Tour of the Continent, after May 1833 and into 1834. MSS IA, VII, VIII, IX, XI. Selections printed PJR, 1:119- 63, 283-85; and more fully in Works, 2:340-87. Drawings, besides those included in Works, reproduced in WS, pl. 23a. Early publication of Andernacht and St. Goar as Fragments from a Metrical Journal in Friendship’s Offering, 1835 (i.e., apparently the Friendship’s Offering for 1836 is intended; see Works, 2:353-54 n. 2; 38:4). Early publication of Ehrenbreitstein / Fragment from a Metrical Journal. / (Aetat 16.) in Poems, 8-12. Although this travelogue has come to be known familiarly as the Account of a Tour of the Continent, no title is assigned to the sequence as a whole in any of the manuscripts; titles are given only to some individual sections. Ruskin began drafting the sections during or after the family’s 1833 Continental tour, partly in MS VIII--a notebook that had been used previously (and continued to be used through 1836) for rough copy--and partly elsewhere, perhaps on loose sheets, now lost, judging by evidence in MS IA. Among the assorted loose items in MS IA are copies of selected sections of the poem, copies that are probably earlier than their final fair copies in MS IX, but that appear too neat to represent first draft. Parts of these copies are in John James’s hand; likewise, other portions of the poem in MSS VII and XI are fair-copied by hands other than Ruskin’s, possibly his mother’s or Mary Richardson’s. Toward the end of the drafts of sections in MS VIII, and mixed in with them, there occur drafts of the birthday poems for John James, nos. 188 and 192, establishing that Ruskin was drafting the Account well into 1834. Fair- copying in MS IX (with the remarkably exacting pencil imitations of line engravings pasted in) was perhaps carried on throughout 1834, judging by the scarcity of other work from that year. It is possible, however, that the fair copy had been largely completed through its Rhine journey sections during the winter of 1833 and early 1834. Following the incompletely fair-copied prose section on Heidelberg, which was the last section to be fair-copied, MS IX contains only drawings, some of which appear inspired by Ruskin’s birthday gift of 22 February 1834, William Brockendon’s Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps. It is as if, enthralled by his new book, Ruskin desired only to try his hand at such illustrations as Brockendon’s, carrying me again over the summits of the higher Alps, over the winding paths of Splugen, and the glaciered crest of the Simplon, and the summmer snows of the St Bernard, and the lovely plains of gentle Italy (RFL 278). This hypothesis--that Ruskin had been steadily fair-copying and drawing in MS IX, until his attention was captured by imitating Brockendon in late February 1834--appears corroborated by comparing the sequence of sections in the fair copy against the progress of draft in MS VIII. To facilitate the following comparisons of fair copy with rough draft, Table 1 arranges the sections of the Account in columns according to manuscript. Column ?, listing MS IX, the illustrated fair copy, should be read as the base column, for only here are the sections listed in the order they appear in manuscript. Other manuscript copies of sections (in IA, VII, VIII, and XI) are matched against the base column in order to establish the relationship between drafting and fair-copying. Thus, the columns for MSS IA, VII, VIII, and XI do not show the sequential order of sections in those manuscripts, but the sequences can be inferred from column ?, which lists Ruskin’s continuous line numbering. Ruskin’s line numbering, which he used in MSS IA and VIII, is carried sequentially throughout the poems; i.e., he did not start his numbering anew with each poem but numbered continuously from poem to poem, skipping over the prose draft. Presumably the system served Ruskin as a guide to fair-copying. In the fair copy, MS IX, he left some pages blank for prose or poetry to be added later but pasted in illustrations, and he filled other pages with writing but left blank spaces for illustrations. To work in this piecemeal manner, he must have known the length of the sections to be copied--hence, his line numbering. It is tempting to declare that the numbering also establishes the sequence of composition; however, the numbering could have been added at any time after the poems’ drafting. ; however, the order of sections in these manuscripts is more conveniently listed in Part 1. For other directions to interpreting Table 1, see the notes at the bottom of the table.) The chronology of composition is equally conjectural, since Ruskin left no dates on draft or fair copy. The first five poems of the travelogue ( Calais, Cassel, Lille, Brussels, and The Meuse ), without their respective prose sections, appear on two sheets in MS IA in the order they are fair-copied in the illustrated version, MS IX (see part 1, MS IA, Content, g). These sheets are mostly in Ruskin’s hand but partly in John James’s. What stage of draft they represent cannot be determined, except that they probably predate the fair-copy MS IX, since they share a characteristic of the MS VIII draft--namely, Ruskin’s line numbering, The line numbering on the two MS IA sheets containing the first five poems begins at one and carries through 173 for the first four poems; the fifth poem, The Meuse, is unnumbered, because it is crowded sideways on the second sheet, with no space left for numbering. One might infer from these two sheets in MS IA containing the initial poems of the Account that Ruskin composed substantial portions of the verse prior to the prose. Such a conclusion cannot be warranted, however, in absence of the purpose of these sheets. Another folded sheet in MS IA does contain a prose section, Calais, as well as the poems Passing the Alps, Milan Cathedral, Andernacht, and St. Goar (see part 1, MS IA, Content, g). Like the other sheets in MS IA, this appears to be a semifinal copy, to which Ruskin has assigned sequential line numbers to the all the poems (i.e., not poem by poem). Like the other two sheets in MS IA, this sheet is undateable authoritatively, although it probably belongs to 1834: its unique copies of Passing the Alps and Milan Cathedral suggest a later stage of composition, following the Rhine journey poems that end the fair copy in MS IX; but the sheet cannot be very late, since its versions of Andernacht and St. Goar are the original poems, not the later versions as revised for Friendship’s Offering, published in 1835. The pieces fair-copied in MS VII cannot be dated, except as probably postdating the last use of that notebook for the fair copy of Athens. Since the draft of that epic was abandoned in 1832, prior to the Account project, this lower limiting date is of no use. Only the MS VIII pieces are unquestionably rough drafts and probably more or less sequential, therefore providing clues to the order of composition, if not precise dates. Also, on the back endpapers of MS VIII, Ruskin entered a list of proposed sections of the poem (reproduced in WS, pl. 6b). Table 1 shows that the first draft sections in MS VIII to be fair-copied in MS IX were the prose sections on Andernacht and St. Goar. At this stage MS IX falters to a halt, with spaces for drawings left blank, and the fair copy following St. Goar--on Heidelberg--left incomplete. Since the fter St. Goar, the Meuse, Cologne, and Brussels--respectively, the fourth, fifth, eleventh, twelfth, fifteenth and seventeenth Account-related entries in MS VIII. This may suggest, though with no certainty, that by the time Ruskin was about halfway into the MS VIII draft (i.e., the fifteenth and seventeenth of thirty- seven items in MS VIII), he had already begun fair-copying and illustrating MS IX, i.e., the poetry and prose sections of Calais, Cassel, Lille, Brussels, Meuse, Aix-la-Chapelle, Cologne, Andernacht, Ehrenbreitstein, St. Goar, and Heidelberg. (Note that MS IX’s relatively late prose sections for Andernacht and St. Goar occur quite early in MS VIII, the fourth and fifth entries, while Aix-la-Chapelle and Ehrenbreitstein and Heidelberg occur later among the MS VIII entries, scattered between the twenty-first and thirty-third.) Since the verse portions of the five opening sections of MS IX exist in MS IA copy, one might hazard that Ruskin began by drafting, fair-copying, and illustrating the Account as a response to Samuel Prout’s Sketches in Flanders and Germany. MS VIII, despite its drafts related to the German stages of the journey, appears more closely modeled on Samuel Rogers’s Italy. Putting aside the prose sections on Andernacht and St. Goar, MS VIII begins with a cluster of mountain pieces--the Arveron and Arve pieces, the sighting of the Alps from Schaffhausen, the crossing of the Alps into Italy--and then roughly alternates Italian and Swiss with German descriptions. In the absence of benchmark dates except at the point when Ruskin paused amid the Tour in MS VIII to compose his father’s birthday poems for 1834 (see app. A, MS VIII, Content, [b]), various scenarios are possible. Unquestionably, the fair-copying in MS IX was begun at home, following the journey, since sections as early as Lille comment on Italian stages of the itenerary (although the tipped-in drawings conceivably could have been started during the journey). This fair-copying may have started from draft, now lost though possibly represented by sheets in MS IA, that could have been composed during the journey itself, or soon following it. If so, the draft in MS VIII shows Ruskin composing for the on-going fair-copying of Lowland and German sections and, simultaneously, for the later largely Swiss and Italian sections that were never fair-copied. (Ruskin did, however, place illustrations, with no text, in MS IX that depict mountain and lake scenes for the later sections; see Works 2:364 n. 1. For these sketches, he also put to use an older rough- draft notebook, MS VI; see app. A, Content [e].) The illustration of the Swiss passages could have been spurred, not only by Rogers’s Italy, but also by William Brockendon’s Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps and H. B. Saussure’s Voyages dans les Alpes, both of which Ruskin received for his birthday in February 1834 (RFL 278). Alternatively, MS VIII could represent Ruskin’s initial poetic response to the Continent--the sublimities of the Alps and the Italian lakes, mediated by Scott, Rogers, and Byron, taking precedence over the Proutian picturesque. (Even the early occurring Andernacht and St. Goar prose sections concern the psychology of mountain and hill viewing.)