Hand
	MS III reflects some Ruskin’s of fledgling uses of pen and ink, first taken up in April 1827, as compared with the earlier MS I and MS IVA, which he wrote entirely in pencil. It was probably to practice printing with pen and ink that he covered the inside back endboard with random words and letters.
	To print “Harry and Lucy,” Vol. 2 and Poetry Descriptive, he copied his letters in ink over top of pencil, which remains visible beneath. He continued to rely on pencil for the drawings in MS III, but not for their legends, which he printed in ink.
Collation
	As W. G. Collingwood remarked, Ruskin worked in differing parts of MS III at widely differing times. A rough chronology of his use of this Red Book can be sorted out as follows, incorporating but revising and elaborating on both Collingwood’s reconstruction (Poems [4o, 1891],1:262; Poems [8o, 1891], 1:263; and Ruskin, Works, 2:530) and Helen Gill Viljoen’s (“Dating MSS. of Boyhood,” Viljoen Papers, box F). 
	1. As indicated by the travel itinerary in “Harry and Lucy,” Vol. 2, Ruskin may have begun this “Harry and Lucy” narrative during an autumn 1827 visit to Wales and Scotland (see Tours 1826–27). He appears originally to have reserved three-quarters of the notebook for “Harry and Lucy,” since later pages (pp. 36, 42) retain the penciled indications, “chap 6” and “chap 7.”  The narrative never extended that far, instead ending with the unfulfilled promise, “But I will put them [Harry and Lucy] on to scarthing moor in another chapter.” He did, however, possibly intend the drawings on pp. ??, 34, 37, and 43 to accompany the projected narrative (see MS III Drawings).
	2. At about the same time that he composed “Harry and Lucy,” Vol. 2, Ruskin entered—farther in the book, following the space left blank for expansion of “Harry and Lucy”—the anthology Poetry Descriptive. As Viljoen comments, the ink printing used for these poems resembles that used for “Harry and Lucy,” Vol. 2, tending to confirm that the two projects were roughly contemporaneous. Certainly, “Wales” and “Spring: Blank Verse,” included in the anthology, were composed not much earlier than May 1827, and their copies here occur among poems likely inspired by the Wales and Scotland journey recorded in “Harry and Lucy” (e.g., the poems “Ragland Castle,” “Lochleven,” “The Hill of Kinnoul”). 
	3. No earlier than the start of 1828, in a smaller, neater print, Ruskin briefly rounded out “Harry and Lucy,” Vol. 2, and followed it with the MS III Second Poetry Anthology (second, that is, after Poetry Descriptive). Ruskin entitled this second anthology “POETRY,” just as he had headed the MS I Poetry Anthology “Poetry.” The anthology included New Year’s Poems, both old and new, so this stage of MS III presumably served as a New Year’s present.
	The terminus for the MS III Poetry Anthology is the drawing “Ragland Castle When Newly Built,” [Miscellaneous Drawing, MS III]. Nothing indicates whether Ruskin drew the picture in early 1828, shortly after entering that second anthology of poems, or whether he carried the anthology up to the pre-existing drawing, perhaps having drawn it in fall/winter 1827 to accompany the poem “Ragland Castle” in Poetry Descriptive. 
	4. By a year later, Ruskin had returned to MS III to copy “The Monastery,” his versification of Scott’s novel. Some portion of this poem, probably the later books, can be dated firmly as early March 1829. To fair-copy the poem, Ruskin used blank pages following Poetry Descriptive until, running out of room at the end of the Red Book, he continued the poem in blank pages that had remained just preceding Poetry Descriptive. He made this clear by, at the end of book 2 of the poem on p. 80, instructing the reader to “go back to page 52 / END OF BOOK SECOND / HERN HILL / DULWICH.”
	Viljoen believed she detected a steady sophistication in the script for “The Monastery,” over the course of its four books, suggesting “that [Ruskin] worked at these transcriptions from early into late 1828” (“Dating MSS. of Boyhood,” Viljoen Papers; she was unaware of the firm evidence placing some portion of the poem in March 1829, although it is true that Ruskin might have started the MS III version sometime in 1828). It is unwise to rely on distinctions in handwriting to date manuscripts so narrowly as a matter of months, since other circumstances besides practice can affect handwriting. One can hazard with some confidence, however, that the tiny ink hand (with no pencil outline beneath) for book 1 of “The Monastery” must be significantly later than the awkward ink lettering (over top of pencil) for Poetry Descriptive, which precedes “The Monastery.” 
	5. Around 9 March 1829, at about the same time that he was entering some portion of “The Monastery,” Ruskin showed he was attentive to his parents’ criticism of leaving his projects unfinished by using blank pages after the MS III Second Poetry Anthology to copy several recent poems—thus forming the MS III Third Poetry Anthology. In so doing, he scotched any plans to continue “Harry and Lucy,” Vol. 2, the pencil notations for “chap. 6” and “chap. 7” still remaining to witness to this intention. But, in any case, he had already wrapped the Second Poetry Anthology around a drawing probably meant for “Harry and Lucy.”