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Adventures Among Books by Andrew Lang
page 11 of 239 (04%)
gave me, haunting me, especially, with a fear of being prematurely
buried, and of waking up before breakfast to find myself in a coffin. Of
all the books I devoured in that year, Poe is the only author whom I wish
I had reserved for later consideration, and whom I cannot conscientiously
recommend to children.

I had already enjoyed a sip 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
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