nd none of the poems?
No wonder the taste of the day is grovelling lower and lower, when
people do not begin with the pure high air of his world! To take up
one of his works after any of our present school of fiction is like
getting up a mountain side after a feverish drawing-room or an
offensive street. If it were possible to know the right moment for a
book to be really tasted--not thrust aside because crammed down--no, it
would not be desirable, as I was going to say, we should only do double
mischief. We are not sent into the world to mould people, but to let
them mould themselves; and the internal elasticity will soon unmake all
the shapes that just now seem to form under my fingers like clay.

'At any rate, the introduction of such a congenial spirit to Sir Walter
was a real treat; Leonard has the very nature to be fired by him, and
Aubrey being excessively scandalized at his ignorance, routed a cheap
"Marmion" out of the little bookshop, and we beguiled a wet afternoon
with it; Aubrey snatching it from me at all the critical passages, for
fear I should not do them justice, and thundering out the battle, which
stirred the other boy like a trumpet sound. Indeed, Leonard got Mab
into a corner, and had a very bad cold in the head when De Wilton was
re-knighted; and when "the hand of Douglas was his own," he jumped up
and shouted out, "Well done, old fellow!" Then he took it to himself
and read it all over again, introductions and all, and has raved ever
since. I wish you could see Aubrey singing out some profane couplet of
"midnight and not a nose," or some more horrible original parody, and
then dodging apparently in the extremity of terror, just as Leonard
furiously charges him.

'But you would have been struck with their discussions over it. Last
night, at tea, they began upon the woeful result of the Wager of
Battle, which seemed to oppress them as if it had really happened. Did
I believe in it? Was I of the Lady Abbess's opinion, that

'"Perchance some form was unobserved,
Perchance in prayer or faith he swerved"?

'This from Aubrey, while Leonard rejoined that even if De Wilton had so
done, it was still injustice that he should be so cruelly ruined, and
Marmion's baseness succeed. It would be like a king wilfully giving
wrong judgment because the right side failed in some respectful
observance. He was sure such a thing could never be. Did I ever know
of a real case wh