I suppose all children agree in looking back with delight on their school Readers. We might not now find so much pathos in 'Bingen on the Rhine,' 'A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers,' or in 'The Soldier's Funeral,' in the declamation of which I was held to have surpassed myself. 'Robert's voice,' said the master on this memorable occasion, 'is not strong, but impressive': an opinion which I was fool enough to carry home to my father; who roasted me for years in consequence. I am sure one should not be so deliciously tickled by the humorous pieces:-'What, crusty? cries Will in a taking, Who would not be crusty with half a year's baking?'
I think this quip would leave us cold. The 'Isles of Greece' seem rather tawdry too; but on the 'Address to the Ocean,' or on 'The Dying Gladiator,' 'time has writ no wrinkle.'
'Tis the morn, but dim and dark, Whither flies the silent lark?' -does the reader recall the moment when his eye first fell upon these lines in the Fourth Reader; and 'surprised with joy, impatient as the wind,' he plunged into the sequel? And there was another piece, this time in prose, which none can have forgotten; many like me must have searched Dickens with zeal to find it again, and in its proper context, and have perhaps been conscious of some inconsiderable measure of disappointment, that it was only Tom Pinch who drove, in such a pomp of poetry, to London.
But in the Reader we are still under guides. What a boy turns out for himself, as he rummages the bookshelves, is the real test and pleasure. My father's library was a spot of some austerity; the proceedings of learned societies, some Latin divinity, cyclopaedias, physical science, and, above all, optics, held the chief place upon the shelves, and it was only in holes and corners that anything really legible existed as by accident. The PARENT'S ASSISTANT, ROBROY, WAVERLEY, and GUY MANNERING, the VOYAGES OF CAPTAIN WOODSROGERS, Fuller's and Bunyan's HOLY WARS, THE REFLECTIONS OF ROBINSONCRUSOE, THE FEMALE BLUEBEARD, G. Sand's MARE AU DIABLE - (how came it in that grave assembly!), Ainsworth's TOWER OF LONDON, and four old volumes of Punch - these were the chief exceptions. In these latter, which made for years the chief of my diet, I very early fell in love (almost as soon as I could spell) with the Snob Papers. I knew them almost by heart, particularly the visit to the Pontos; and I remember my surprise when I found, long afterwards, that they were famous, and signed with a famous name; to me, as I read and admired them, they were the works of Mr. Punch. Time and again I tried to read ROB ROY, with whom of course I was acquainted from the TALES OF A GRANDFATHER;time and again the early part, with Rashleigh and (think of it!) the adorable Diana, choked me off; and I shall never forget the pleasure and surprise with which, lying on the floor one summer evening, Istruck of a sudden into the first scene with Andrew Fairservice.
'The worthy Dr. Lightfoot' - 'mistrysted with a bogle' - 'a wheen green trash' - 'Jenny, lass, I think I ha'e her': from that day to this the phrases have been unforgotten. I read on, I need scarce say; I came to Glasgow, I bided tryst on Glasgow Bridge, I met Rob Roy and the Bailie in the Tolbooth, all with transporting pleasure;and then the clouds gathered once more about my path; and I dozed and skipped until I stumbled half-asleep into the clachan of Aberfoyle, and the voices of Iverach and Galbraith recalled me to myself. With that scene and the defeat of Captain Thornton the book concluded;Helen and her sons shocked even the little schoolboy of nine or ten with their unreality; I read no more, or I did not grasp what I was reading; and years elapsed before I consciously met Diana and her father among the hills, or saw Rashleigh dying in the chair. When Ithink of that novel and that evening, I am impatient with all others;they seem but shadows and impostors; they cannot satisfy the appetite which this awakened; and I dare be known to think it the best of Sir Walter's by nearly as much as Sir Walter is the best of novelists.
Perhaps Mr. Lang is right, and our first friends in the land of fiction are always the most real. And yet I had read before this GUYMANNERING, and some of WAVERLEY, with no such delighted sense of truth and humour, and I read immediately after the greater part of the Waverley Novels, and was never moved again in the same way or to the same degree. One circumstance is suspicious: my critical estimate of the Waverley Novels has scarce changed at all since I was ten. ROB ROY, GUY MANNERING, and REDGAUNTLET first; then, a little lower; THE FORTUNES OF NIGEL; then, after a huge gulf, IVANHOE and ANNE OF GEIERSTEIN: the rest nowhere; such was the verdict of the boy. Since then THE ANTIQUARY, ST. RONAN'S WELL, KENILWORTH, and THEHEART OF MIDLOTHIAN have gone up in the scale; perhaps IVANHOE ANDANNE OF GEIERSTEIN have gone a trifle down; Diana Vernon has been added to my admirations in that enchanted world of ROB ROY; I think more of the letters in REDGAUNTLET, and Peter Peebles, that dreadful piece of realism, I can now read about with equanimity, interest, and I had almost said pleasure, while to the childish critic he often caused unmixed distress. But the rest is the same; I could not finish THE PIRATE when I was a child, I have never finished it yet;PEVERIL OF THE PEAK dropped half way through from my schoolboy hands, and though I have since waded to an end in a kind of wager with myself, the exercise was quite without enjoyment. There is something disquieting in these considerations. I still think the visit to Ponto's the best part of the BOOK OF SNOBS: does that mean that Iwas right when I was a child, or does it mean that I have never grown since then, that the child is not the man's father, but the man? and that I came into the world with all my faculties complete, and have only learned sinsyne to be more tolerant of boredom? . . .