rejoicing in the first triumphs of the younger singer.

So the ten years of approach and attack--in the intellectual
sense--came to an end, and the ten central years of mastery and success
began. Toward the end of that time, as a girl of sixteen, I became a
resident in Oxford. Up to then Ruskin--the _Stones of Venice_ and
certain chapters in _Modern Painters_--had been my chief intellectual
passion in a childhood and first youth that cut but a very poor figure,
as I look back upon them, beside the "wonderful children" of this
generation! But it must have been about 1868 that I first read _Essays
in Criticism._ It is not too much to say that the book set for me the
currents of life; its effect heightened, no doubt, by the sense of
kinship. Above all it determined in me, as in many others, an enduring
love of France and of French literature, which played the part of
schoolmaster to a crude youth. I owe this to my uncle, and it was a
priceless boon. If he had only lived a little longer--if he had not died
so soon after I had really begun to know him--how many debts to him
would have been confessed, how many things said, which, after all, were
never said!




CHAPTER IV


OTHER CHILDREN OF FOX HOW


I have now to sketch some other figures in the Fox How circle, together