FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31  
32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   >>   >|  
e the character and effect of virgin forest. Having no boy-companions (for my only brother was ten years older than myself), of course I played no games, except croquet. I was brought up in a sporting home, my father being an enthusiastic fox-hunter and a good all-round sportsman. I abhorred shooting, and was badly bored by coursing and fishing. Indeed, I believe I can say with literal truth that I have never killed anything larger than a wasp, and that only in self-defence. But Woburn is an ideal country for riding, and I spent a good deal of my time on an excellent pony, or more strictly, galloway. An hour or two with the hounds was the reward of virtue in the schoolroom; and cub-hunting in a woodland country at 7 o'clock on a September morning still remains my most cherished memory of physical enjoyment. "That things are not as ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and now rest in unvisited tombs." Most true: and among that faithful number I must remember our governess,--Catherine Emily Runciman--who devoted forty years of her life, in one capacity or another, to us and to our parents. She was what boys call "jolly out of school," but rather despotic in it; and, after a few trials of strength, I was emancipated from her control when I was eight. When we were in London for the Session of Parliament, I attended a Day School, kept by two sisters of John Leech, in a curious little cottage, since destroyed, at the bottom of Lower Belgrave Street. Just at the age when, in the ordinary course, I should have gone to a boarding-school, it was discovered that I was physically unfit for the experiment; and then I had a series of tutors at home. To one of these tutors my father wrote--"I must warn you of your pupil's powers of conversation, and tact in leading his teachers into it." But I was to a great extent self-taught. We had an excellent, though old-fashioned, library, and I spent a great deal of my time in miscellaneous reading. The Waverley Novels gave me my first taste of literary enjoyment, and _Pickwick_ (in the original green covers) came soon after. Shakespeare and _Don Quixote_ were imposed by paternal authority. Jeremy Taylor, Fielding, Smollett, Swift, Dryden, Pope, Byron, Moore, Macaulay, Miss Edgeworth, Bulwer-Lytton, were among my earliest friends, and I had an insatiable thirst for dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Tennyson was the fir
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   7   8   9   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31  
32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   >>   >|  



Top keywords:

country

 

school

 

enjoyment

 

tutors

 

number

 

excellent

 

father

 

bottom

 
destroyed
 

Lytton


curious

 

cottage

 

Belgrave

 
boarding
 

discovered

 
physically
 
Edgeworth
 
Street
 

ordinary

 
Bulwer

encyclopaedias

 

control

 

emancipated

 

Tennyson

 

trials

 

strength

 

dictionaries

 

thirst

 

School

 
friends

sisters
 
earliest
 
attended
 

insatiable

 

London

 

Session

 
Parliament
 
Macaulay
 
miscellaneous
 

paternal


reading
 

Waverley

 

library

 

fashioned

 

Taylor

 

Jeremy

 

authority

 

Novels

 

imposed

 

original