One good thing, if no more, these memories may accomplish. Young men,
especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend "a course of
reading." Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for
books _read all of them_. There is no other course. Let this be a
reply. No other answer shall they get from me, the inquiring young men.



II


People talk, in novels, about the delights of a first love. One may
venture to doubt whether everybody exactly knows which was his, or her,
first love, of men or women, but about our first loves in books there can
be no mistake. They were, and remain, the dearest of all; after boyhood
the bloom is off the literary rye. The first parcel of these garrulities
ended when the author left school, at about the age of seventeen. One's
literary equipment seems to have been then almost as complete as it ever
will be, one's tastes definitely formed, one's favourites already chosen.
As long as we live we hope to read, but we never can "recapture the first
fine careless rapture." Besides, one begins to write, and that is fatal.
My own first essays were composed at school--for other boys. Not long
ago the gentleman who was then our English master wrote to me, informing
me he was my earliest public, and that he had never credited my younger
brother with the essays which that unscrupulous lad ("I speak of him but
brotherly") was accustomed to present for his consideration.

On leaving school at seventeen I went to St. Leonard's Hall, in the
University of St. Andrews. That is the oldest of Scotch universities,