Jacobin, in the time when the French Republic cast its glare
of promise over the world. Here, too, were the Queen Anne
authors, his models, and the English novelists; but among
them I found none that charmed me. Smollett, Fielding, and the
like, deal too broadly with the coarse actualities of life.
The best of their men and women--so merely natural, with the
nature found every day--do not meet our hopes. Sometimes the
simple picture, warm with life and the light of the common
sun, cannot fail to charm,--as in the wedded love of
Fielding's Amelia,--but it is at a later day, when the mind is
trained to comparison, that we learn to prize excellence like
this as it deserves. Early youth is prince-like: it-will bend
only to "the king, my father." Various kinds of excellence
please, and leave their impression, but the most commanding,
alone, is duly acknowledged at that all-exacting age.

'Three great authors it was my fortune to meet at this
important period,--all, though of unequal, yet congenial
powers,--all of rich and wide, rather than aspiring
genius,--all free to the extent of the horizon their eye took
in,--all fresh with impulse, racy with experience; never to
be lost sight of, or superseded, but always to be apprehended
more and more.

'Ever memorable is the day on which I first took a volume of
SHAKSPEARE in my hand to read. It was on a Sunday.

'--This day was punctiliously set apart in our house. We had
family prayers, for which there was no time on other days. Our
dinners were different, and our clothes. We went to church. My