ott is not an author like another,
but our earliest known friend in letters; for, of course, we did not ask
who Shakespeare was, nor inquire about the private history of Madame
d'Aulnoy. Scott peopled for us the rivers and burnsides with his
reivers; the Fairy Queen came out of Eildon Hill and haunted Carterhaugh;
at Newark Tower we saw "the embattled portal arch"--

"Whose ponderous grate and massy bar
Had oft rolled back the tide of war,"--

just as, at Foulshiels, on Yarrow, we beheld the very roofless cottage
whence Mungo Park went forth to trace the waters of the Niger, and at
Oakwood the tower of the Wizard Michael Scott.

Probably the first novel I ever read was read at Elgin, and the story was
"Jane Eyre." This tale was a creepy one for a boy of nine, and Rochester
was a mystery, St. John a bore. But the lonely little girl in her
despair, when something came into the room, and her days of starvation at
school, and the terrible first Mrs. Rochester, were not to be forgotten.
They abide in one's recollection with a Red Indian's ghost, who carried a
rusty ruined gun, and whose acquaintance was made at the same time.

I fancy I was rather an industrious little boy, and that I had minded my
lessons, and satisfied my teachers--I know I was reading Pinnock's
"History of Rome" for pleasure--till "the wicked day of destiny" came,
and I felt a "call," and underwent a process which may be described as
the opposite of "conversion." The "call" came from Dickens. "Pickwick"
was brought into the house. From that hour it was all over, for five or
six years, with anything like industry and lesson-books. I read
"Pickwick" in convulsions of mirth. I dropped Pinnock's "Rome" for good.
I neglected everything printed in Latin, in fact everything that one was
understood to prepare for one's classes in the school whither I was now
sent, in Edinburgh. For there, living a rather lonely small boy in the
house of an aged relation, I found the Waverley Novels. The rest is
transport. A conscientious tutor dragged me through the Latin grammar,
and a constitutional dislike to being beaten on the hands with a leather
strap urged me to acquire a certain amount of elementary erudition. But,
for a year, I was a young hermit, living with Scott in the "Waverleys"
and the "Border Minstrelsy," with Pope, and Prior, and a translation of
Ariosto, with Lever and Dickens, David Copperfield and Charles O'Malley,
Longfellow and Mayne Re