but I hated Swift for the Houyhnhnms and never quite liked a horse
afterwards. Then I remember also a translation of Voltaire's "Candide,"
and "Rasselas;" and, vast book though it was, I really believe I read,
in a muzzy sort of way of course, from end to end, and even with some
reference now and then to the Atlas, Gibbon--in twelve volumes.

These readings whetted my taste for more, and surreptitiously I raided
the bookcases in the big saloon. I got through quite a number of
books before my sacrilegious temerity was discovered by Ann, the old
head-housemaid. I remember that among others I tried a translation of
Plato's "Republic" then, and found extraordinarily little interest in
it; I was much too young for that; but "Vathek"--"Vathek" was glorious
stuff. That kicking affair! When everybody HAD to kick!

The thought of "Vathek" always brings back with it my boyish memory of
the big saloon at Bladesover.

It was a huge long room with many windows opening upon the park, and
each window--there were a dozen or more reaching from the floor up--had
its elaborate silk or satin curtains, heavily fringed, a canopy (is it?)
above, its completely white shutters folding into the deep thickness of
the wall. At either end of that great still place was an immense marble
chimney-piece; the end by the bookcase showed the wolf and Romulus and
Remus, with Homer and Virgil for supporters; the design of the other end
I have forgotten. Frederick, Prince of Wales, swaggered flatly over the
one, twice life-size, but mellowed by the surface gleam of oil; and
over the other was an equally colossal group of departed Drews as sylvan
deities, scantily clad, against a storm-rent sky. Down the centre of the
elaborate ceiling were three chandeliers, each bearing some hundreds of
dangling glass lustres, and over the interminable carpet--it impressed