One's school-boy adventures among books ended not long after winning the
friendship of Homer and Thucydides, of Lucretius and Catullus. One's
application was far too desultory to make a serious and accurate scholar.

I confess to having learned the classical languages, as it were by
accident, for the sake of what is in them, and with a provokingly
imperfect accuracy. Cricket and trout occupied far too much of my mind
and my time: Christopher North, and Walton, and Thomas Tod Stoddart, and
"The Moor and the Loch," were my holiday reading, and I do not regret it.
Philologists and Ireland scholars are not made so, but you can, in no
way, fashion a scholar out of a casual and inaccurate intelligence. The
true scholar is one whom I envy, almost as much as I respect him; but
there is a kind of mental short-sightedness, where accents and verbal
niceties are concerned, which cannot be sharpened into true scholarship.
Yet, even for those afflicted in this way, and with the malady of being
"idle, careless little boys," the ancient classics have a value for which
there is no substitute. There is a charm in finding ourselves--our
common humanity, our puzzles, our cares, our joys, in the writings of men
severed from us by race, religion, speech, and half the gulf of
historical time--which no other literary pleasure can equal. Then there
is to be added, as the university preacher observed, "the pleasure of
despising our fellow-creatures who do not know Greek." Doubtless in that
there is great consolation.

It would be interesting, were it possible, to know what proportion of
people really care for poetry, and how the love of poetry came to them,
and grew in them, and where and when it stopped. Modern poets whom one
meets are apt to say that poetry is not read at all. Byron's Murray
ceased to publish poetry in 1830, just when Tennyson and Browning were
striking their preludes. Probably Mr. Murray was wise in his generation.
But it is also likely that many persons, even now, are attached to
poetry, though they certainly do not buy contemporary verse. How did the
passion come to them? How long did it stay? When did the Muse say good-
bye? To myself, as I have remarked, poetry came with Sir Walter Scott,
for one read Shakespeare as a child, rather in a kind of dream of
fairyland and enchanted isles, than with any distinct consciousness that
one was occupied with poetry. Next to Scott, with me, came Longfellow,
who pleased o