ge I made with a blunted pin about that large,
incorrect and dignified world. The books in that little old closet had
been banished, I suppose, from the saloon during the Victorian revival
of good taste and emasculated orthodoxy, but my mother had no suspicion
of their character. So I read and understood the good sound rhetoric of
Tom Paine's "Rights of Man," and his "Common Sense," excellent books,
once praised by bishops and since sedulously lied about. Gulliver was
there unexpurgated, strong meat for a boy perhaps but not too strong I
hold--I have never regretted that I escaped niceness in these affairs.
The satire of Traldragdubh made my blood boil as it was meant to do,
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 o