Adventures among Books | Page 5

in England we found another paradise, a
circulating library with brown, greasy, ill-printed, odd volumes of
Shakespeare and of the "Arabian Nights." How their stained pages
come before the eyes again--the pleasure and the puzzle of them! What
did the lady in the Geni's glass box want with the Merchants? what
meant all these conversations between the Fat Knight and Ford, in the
"Merry Wives"? It was delightful, but in parts it was difficult.
Fragments of "The Tempest," and of other plays, remain stranded in my
memory from these readings: Ferdinand and Miranda at chess,

Cleopatra cuffing the messenger, the asp in the basket of figs, the Friar
and the Apothecary, Troilus on the Ilian walls, a vision of Cassandra in
white muslin with her hair down. People forbid children to read this or
that. I am sure they need not, and that even in our infancy the magician,
Shakespeare, brings us nothing worse than a world of beautiful visions,
half realised. In the Egyptian wizard's little pool of ink, only the pure
can see the visions, and in Shakespeare's magic mirror children see
only what is pure. Among other books of that time I only recall a kind
of Sunday novel, "Naomi; or, The Last Days of Jerusalem." Who,
indeed, could forget the battering-rams, and the man who cried on the
battlements, "Woe, woe to myself and to Jerusalem!" I seem to hear
him again when boys break the hum of London with yells of the latest
"disaster."
We left England in a year, went back to Scotland, and awoke, as it were,
to know the glories of our birth. We lived in Scott's country, within
four miles of Abbotsford, and, so far, we had heard nothing of it. I
remember going with one of the maids into the cottage of a kinsman of
hers, a carpenter; a delightful place, where there was sawdust, where
our first fishing-rods were fashioned. Rummaging among the books, of
course, I found some cheap periodical with verses in it. The lines began
-
"The Baron of Smaylhome rose with day, He spurred his courser on,
Without stop or stay, down the rocky way That leads to Brotherstone."
A rustic tea-table was spread for us, with scones and honey, not to be
neglected. But they WERE neglected till we had learned how -
"The sable score of fingers four Remains on that board impressed, And
for evermore that lady wore A covering on her wrist."
We did not know nor ask the poet's name. Children, probably, say very
little about what is in their minds; but that unhappy knight, Sir Richard
of Coldinghame, and the Priest, with his chamber in the east, and the
moody Baron, and the Lady, have dwelt in our mind ever since, and
hardly need to be revived by looking at "The Eve of St. John."

Soon after that we were told about Sir Walter, how great he was, how
good, how, like Napoleon, his evil destiny found him at last, and he
wore his heart away for honour's sake. And we were given the "Lay,"
and "The Lady of the Lake." It was my father who first read "Tam o'
Shanter" to me, for which I confess I did not care at that time,
preferring to take witches and bogies with great seriousness. It seemed
as if Burns were trifling with a noble subject. But it was in a summer
sunset, beside a window looking out on Ettrick and the hill of the Three
Brethren's Cairn, that I first read, with the dearest of all friends, how -
"The stag at eve had drunk his fill Where danced the moon on Monan's
rill, And deep his midnight lair had made In lone Glenartney's hazel
shade."
Then opened the gates of romance, and with Fitz-James we drove the
chase, till -
"Few were the stragglers, following far, That reached the lake of
Vennachar, And when the Brig of Turk was won, The foremost
horseman rode alone."
From that time, for months, there was usually a little volume of Scott in
one's pocket, in company with the miscellaneous collection of a boy's
treasures. Scott certainly took his fairy folk seriously, and the Mauth
Dog was rather a disagreeable companion to a small boy in wakeful
hours. {1} After this kind of introduction to Sir Walter, after learning
one's first lessons in history from the "Tales of a Grandfather," nobody,
one hopes, can criticise him in cold blood, or after the manner of Mr.
Leslie Stephen, who is not sentimental. Scott is not an author like
another, but our earliest known friend in letters; for, of course, we did
not ask who Shakespeare was, nor inquire about the private history of
Madame d'Aulnoy. Scott peopled for us the rivers and burnsides with
his reivers;