252 EARLY REMINISCENCES were the complete works of Voltaire, Rousseau, Florian, Scarron, Moliere and Montaigne, innumerable volumes of the Bibliotheque des Dames containing volumes of travels, history, of science, seventeen volumes of Morale, not one word in them from Solomon or from the New Testament, but all from Cicero, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius and Jean Jacques Rousseau. The science was stale, the morale flat. Above all the rest was a collection in prose of the stories of the mediaeval heroic romances, Huon de Bordeaux, Amadis of Gaul, Tristan, Pierre de Provence, etc. etc. Of German works there were Gothe, Schiller, Uhland, Uz, Wieland, Gessner, Tieck, Fouque, and Schlegel. There was also a goodly assortment of English classics. All these I devoured with insatiable appetite. In a word, my friends at this period were French, German and English writers from Chaucer downward, the very books that turned the brain of Don Quixote, and the German waiters of the nascent Romantic School, quickening the imagination, " the source of all errors " as my father said. I think that I can endorse the experience of Varnhagen von Ense, as expressed in his Memoirs. " Tales of knight errantry, ghost stories, romances, love adventures and wondrous tales of all sorts formed the matter of my reading. Although we knew that our father disapproved of them, we devoured them eagerly and revelled in the world of fancy which opened to us. I cannot say that this empty reading, which was perused for three months, did me any harm. The saying is sound, that a black cow yields white milk. I did not perceive what was bad in what I perused ; and, unlike Tischbein's ass, which ate pineapples, thinking that they were thistles, I ate thistles in abundance and supposed that they were pineapples." They were nourishment of a sort, and not poisonous ; they did me no harm, if they did me no good. Looking back at this period of hobbledehoy hood, I can see that it bred in me a shrinking from society and a consequent love for isolation, and therewith a lack of conversational gifts. Now in my advanced age when deafness has supervened, I feel little or no concern over the fact that I cannot hear what is passing from mouth to ear about' me. Those whose words I really do value are to be found in books, not in small talk on food, motors, lawn-tennis, bridge and novels. That this defect should serve
