r, might be seen walking with his wife and umbrella. The writing
of poems "up to" pictures, the beer with Warrington in the mornings, the
suppers in the back-kitchen, these were the alluring things, not society,
and Lady Rockminster, and Lord Steyne. Well, one has run away to
literature since, but where is the matutinal beer? Where is the back-
kitchen? Where are Warrington, and Foker, and F. B.? I have never met
them in this living world, though Brown, the celebrated reviewer, is
familiar to me, and also Mr. Sydney Scraper, of the Oxford and Cambridge
Club. Perhaps back-kitchens exist, perhaps there are cakes and ale in
the life literary, and F. B. may take his walks by the Round Pond. But
one never encounters these rarities, and Bungay and Bacon are no longer
the innocent and ignorant rivals whom Thackeray drew. They do not give
those wonderful parties; Miss Bunnion has become quite conventional;
Percy Popjoy has abandoned letters; Mr. Wenham does not toady; Mr. Wagg
does not joke any more. The literary life is very like any other, in
London, or is it that we do not see it aright, not having the eyes of
genius? Well, a life on the ocean wave, too, may not be so desirable as
it seems in Marryat's novels: so many a lad whom he tempted into the navy
has discovered. The best part of the existence of a man of letters is
his looking forward to it through the spectacles of Titmarsh.

One can never say how much one owes to a school-master who was a friend
of literature, who kept a houseful of books, and who was himself a
graceful scholar, and an author, while he chose to write, of poetic and
humorous genius. Such was the master who wrote the "Day Dreams of a
Schoolmaster," Mr. D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, to whom, in this place, I
am glad to confess my gratitude after all these many years. While we
were deep in the history of Pendennis we were also being dragged through
the Commentaries of Caius Julius Caesar, through the Latin and Greek
grammars, through Xenophon, and the Eclogues of Virgil, and a depressing
play of Euripides, the "Phoenissae." I can never say how much I detested
these authors, who, taken in small doses, are far, indeed, from being
attractive. Horace, to a lazy boy, appears in his Odes to have nothing
to say, and to say it in the most frivolous and vexatious manner. Then
Cowper's "Task," or "Paradise Lost," as school-books, with notes, seems
arid enough to a school-boy. I remember reading ahead,