WELL; and these, having already made all suitable endeavour, I now
know that I shall never read - to make up for which unfaithfulness
I could read much of the rest for ever. Of Moliere - surely the
next greatest name of Christendom - I could tell a very similar
story; but in a little corner of a little essay these princes are
too much out of place, and I prefer to pay my fealty and pass on.
How often I have read GUY MANNERING, ROB ROY, OR REDGAUNTLET, I
have no means of guessing, having begun young. But it is either
four or five times that I have read THE EGOIST, and either five or
six that I have read the VICOMTE DE BRAGELONNE.

Some, who would accept the others, may wonder that I should have
spent so much of this brief life of ours over a work so little
famous as the last. And, indeed, I am surprised myself; not at my
own devotion, but the coldness of the world. My acquaintance with
the VICOMTE began, somewhat indirectly, in the year of grace 1863,
when I had the advantage of studying certain illustrated dessert
plates in a hotel at Nice. The name of d'Artagnan in the legends I
already saluted like an old friend, for I had met it the year
before in a work of Miss Yonge's. My first perusal was in one of
those pirated editions that swarmed at that time out of Brussels,
and ran to such a troop of neat and dwarfish volumes. I understood
but little of the merits of the book; my strongest memory is of the
execution of d'Eymeric and Lyodot - a strange testimony to the
dulness of a boy, who could enjoy the rough-and-tumble in the Place
de Greve, and forget d'Artagnan's visits to the two financiers. My
next reading was in winter-time, when I lived alone upon the
Pentlands. I would return in the early night from one of my
patrols with the shepherd; a friendly face would meet me in the
door, a friendly retriever scurry upstairs to fetch my slippers;