Misdated autumn 1831 into 1832 by Viljoen and by Burd, following Viljoen, in  Ruskin’s Testament.  The dates of the Sermon Books are based on the positions of rough drafts of sermons relative to other dateable material in the Red Books and on the proximity of both rough drafts and fair copies to Euclidean exercises, which are independently dateable. The conclusions in Appendix B concerning the dating of portions of the Sermon Books can be summarized as follows: A benchmark of early 1833 is established for the draft of sermon VIII in MS IVC by its position relative to mineralogy notes and its interleaving with Euclidean exercises (see nos. 173-74). If Ruskin drafted the sermons more or less sequentially and fair-copied them as he drafted (an inference supported by his fair-copying over top of erased draft in no. 170), the first six sermons would have been drafted and copied from late 1832 through early 1833, possibly wholly in early 1833. This date is confirmed by the manuscript bearing the closest physical resemblance to the Sermon Books, no. 160a, which was started in February 1832. Moreover, little other writing survives from late 1832 into 1833, suggesting that Ruskin was wholly engaged with the earlier Sermon Books (see no. 170).
	Sermons VII, IX, and X exist in draft, but no independent evidence establishes the date of those drafts; they can therefore only be assumed to be roughly contemporaneous with sermon VIII, early 1833 (see no. 175). After May 1833, Ruskin would have been distracted from working on the final third of the sermons by the family’s first Continental tour and, following their return in late September, his composition of  A Tour of the Continent.  He could have carried on with the Sermon Books during the tour itself, just as the similarly handsewn fair-copy tour diary, no. 83, was manufactured during the Lakes tour of 1830. However, for reasons discussed in the note to no. 182, early 1834 appears likelier for the final third. Alongside their fair copies in MS IIE exist geometry exercises, and Ruskin does refer elsewhere to continued work on Euclid in early 1834 (see no. 173).