Adventures among Books | Page 7

of Thackeray, reading at a venture, in
"Vanity Fair," about the Battle of Waterloo. It was not like Lever's
accounts of battles, but it was enchanting. However, "Vanity Fair" was
under a taboo. It is not easy to say why; but Mr. Thackeray himself
informed a small boy, whom he found reading "Vanity Fair" under the
table, that he had better read something else. What harm can the story

do to a child? He reads about Waterloo, about fat Jos, about little
George and the pony, about little Rawdon and the rat-hunt, and is
happy and unharmed.
Leaving my hermitage, and going into the very different and very
disagreeable world of a master's house, I was lucky enough to find a
charming library there. Most of Thackeray was on the shelves, and
Thackeray became the chief enchanter. As Henry Kingsley says, a boy
reads him and thinks he knows all about life. I do not think that the
mundane parts, about Lady Kew and her wiles, about Ethel and the
Marquis of Farintosh, appealed to one or enlightened one. Ethel was a
mystery, and not an interesting mystery, though one used to copy
Doyle's pictures of her, with the straight nose, the impossible eyes, the
impossible waist. It was not Ethel who captivated us; it was Clive's
youth and art, it was J. J., the painter, it was jolly F. B. and his address
to the maid about the lobster. "A finer fish, Mary, my dear, I have never
seen. Does not this solve the vexed question whether lobsters are fish,
in the French sense?" Then "The Rose and the Ring" came out. It was
worth while to be twelve years old, when the Christmas books were
written by Dickens and Thackeray. I got hold of "The Rose and the
Ring," I know, and of the "Christmas Carol," when they were damp
from the press. King Valoroso, and Bulbo, and Angelica were even
more delightful than Scrooge, and Tiny Tim, and Trotty Veck. One
remembers the fairy monarch more vividly, and the wondrous array of
egg-cups from which he sipped brandy--or was it right Nantes?-- still
"going on sipping, I am sorry to say," even after "Valoroso was himself
again."
But, of all Thackeray's books, I suppose "Pendennis" was the favourite.
The delightful Marryat had entertained us with Peter Simple and
O'Brien (how good their flight through France is!) with Mesty and Mr.
Midshipman Easy, with Jacob Faithful (Mr. Thackeray's favourite), and
with Snarleyyow; but Marryat never made us wish to run away to sea.
That did not seem to be one's vocation. But the story of Pen made one
wish to run away to literature, to the Temple, to streets where Brown,
the famous reviewer, might be seen walking with his wife and umbrella.
The writing of poems "up to" pictures, the beer with Warrington in the

mornings, the suppers in the back-kitchen, these were the alluring
things, not society, and Lady Rockminster, and Lord Steyne. Well, one
has run away to literature since, but where is the matutinal beer? Where
is the back-kitchen? Where are Warrington, and Foker, and F. B.? I
have never met them in this living world, though Brown, the celebrated
reviewer, is familiar to me, and also Mr. Sydney Scraper, of the Oxford
and Cambridge Club. Perhaps back-kitchens exist, perhaps there are
cakes and ale in the life literary, and F. B. may take his walks by the
Round Pond. But one never encounters these rarities, and Bungay and
Bacon are no longer the innocent and ignorant rivals whom Thackeray
drew. They do not give those wonderful parties; Miss Bunnion has
become quite conventional; Percy Popjoy has abandoned letters; Mr.
Wenham does not toady; Mr. Wagg does not joke any more. The
literary life is very like any other, in London, or is it that we do not see
it aright, not having the eyes of genius? Well, a life on the ocean wave,
too, may not be so desirable as it seems in Marryat's novels: so many a
lad whom he tempted into the navy has discovered. The best part of the
existence of a man of letters is his looking forward to it through the
spectacles of Titmarsh.
One can never say how much one owes to a school-master who was a
friend of literature, who kept a houseful of books, and who was himself
a graceful scholar, and an author, while he chose to write, of poetic and
humorous genius. Such was the master who wrote the "Day Dreams of
a Schoolmaster," Mr. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, to whom, in this
place, I am glad to confess my gratitude after all these many years.
While we were deep in the history of Pendennis we were also being
dragged through the Commentaries of Caius Julius