The emblematic drawing was perhaps inspired by a passage in Harry and Lucy Concluded (1825) by Maria Edgeworth: Only “those who are themselves children, or . . . those who know children right well” will credit Harry and Lucyʼs “sudden falls from the heights of wisdom to the depths of folly”. The protagonists have been engaged in well‐regulated learning: Harry has been teaching Lucy the mechanics of air pumps, using a pump made of glass in order to exhibit its inner workings. “How did Harry and Lucy spend the remainder of this morning, two whole hours?” the narrator asks. They spoil the glass pump by setting it to work in a muddy puddle, and they soil their clothing so badly that they are forced to hide in a tree to avoid their motherʼs summons to greet unexpected visitors. To their consternation, their shame and bashfulness cost them an interesting account of a shipwreck, which the visitors related. Harry and Lucy beg their mother to repeat the story, but she refuses lest they lose this motivation to overcome their follies of bashfulness and carelessness with their things. (Harry and Lucy Concluded1:103, and see 103–14).

Assuming that the source is correctly identified, Ruskin can be seen translating an example of Edgeworthian experiential learning into the kind of didactic discourse that the Edgeworths opposed—teaching a child by lecture or emblem instead of allowing children to arrive at wisdom for themselves through their own experience. Ruskinʼs emblematic picture dispenses with narrative details—experience—in order to distill a pictorial contrast of “heights of wisdom” and “depths of folly”. Ruskinʼs edition of Harry and Lucy Concluded was not illustrated (see Books Used by Ruskin in His Youth: Physical Descriptions), and the Edgeworths would not have approved of illustration in the form of allegory. In other books owned by Ruskin, however, emblems were familiar, such as Christmas Tales by Solomon Sobersides. Its frontispiece represents Wisdom and Folly competing to lead the steps of youth, as explained by an accompanying text: “See here the Youth, by Wisdom led, / The Paths of Life, securely tread; / The dangʼrous Lures of Folly shun, / And Virtueʼs Course serenely run.”

The emblems in this woodcut are unpacked in an essay introducing the copy of Christmas Tales held by the Hockliffe Collection: “A masterpiece of its kind”, the engraving shows “Wisdom (looking rather like Britannia) giving a book to a young boy, while Folly (distinguished by her foolʼs hat) tries to distract him with a rattle. Behind them, we see the solid and magnificent temple built by Wisdom, and the ruined temple which must be the result of heeding the ‘Lures of Folly’” (“Hockliffe Project: Stories before 1850—0220: Anon. [‘Solomon Sobersides’], Christmas Tales”). The emblems in the frontispiece are derived from traditional sources, such as those found in Cesare Ripaʼs Iconologia, but they have been adapted to a childʼs text. The youth is put in the place of the classical hero, Hercules, who according to a parable must choose between virtue and vice. An example of an adaptation in neoclassical art is Hercules at the Crossroads (1748) by Pompeo Girolamo Batoni, in which Hercules weighs the alternatives offered on the one hand by Venus and on the other by the armored figure of Minerva, who points to the Temple of Fame on a hill. In one of Ruskinʼs favorite boyhood books, Evenings at Home, he would have encountered a version adapted for girls, “The Female Choice: A Tale” in which the heroine is divided between the appeals of Dissipation and Housewifery (Barbauld and Aikin, Evenings at Home, 3:160–65). Another boyhood book filled with emblems was of course Pilgrimʼs Progress by John Bunyan.

Toward the end of 1826 or beginning of 1827, about three months prior to Ruskin drawing this emblem of folly and wisdom, he described another emblematic figure in verse as a New Yearʼs poem for his father—the figure of time in Time: Blank Verse

As the concluding item on the final page of MS I, Ruskinʼs emblem seems to complement the “frontispiece” of his own “Harry and Lucy Concluded . . . vol I” at the beginning of the Red Book. The shape of the deep ravine is an inversion of the oddly triangular shape labled “a rainbow” in the frontispiece.

At the bottom of the drawing added a note, apparently unrelated to the topic of the drawing: “