of a desultory bookish boyhood. It was
not in nature that one should not begin to rhyme for one's self. But
those exercises were seldom even written down; they lived a little while
in a memory which has lost them long ago. I do remember me that I tried
some of my attempts on my dear mother, who said much what Dryden said to
"Cousin Swift," "You will never be a poet," a decision in which I
straightway acquiesced. For to rhyme is one thing, to be a poet quite
another. A good deal of mortification would be avoided if young men and
maidens only kept this obvious fact well posed in front of their vanity
and their ambition.

In these bookish memories I have said nothing about religion and
religious books, for various reasons. But, unlike other Scots of the
pen, I got no harm from "The Shorter Catechism," of which I remember
little, and neither then nor now was or am able to understand a single
sentence. Some precocious metaphysicians comprehended and stood aghast
at justification, sanctification, adoption, and effectual calling. These,
apparently, were necessary processes in the Scottish spiritual life. But
we were not told what they meant, nor were we distressed by a sense that
we had not passed through them. From most children, one trusts,
Calvinism ran like water off a duck's back; unlucky were they who first
absorbed, and later were compelled to get rid of, "The Shorter
Catechism!"

One good thing, if no more, these memories may accomplish. Young men,
especially in America, write to me and ask me to recommend "a course of
reading." Distrust a course of reading! People who really care for
books _read all of them_. There is no other course. Let this be a
reply. No other answer shall they get from me, the inquiring young men.

II

People talk, in novels, about the delights of a first love. One may
venture to doubt whether everybody exactly knows which was his, or her,
first love, of men or women, but about our first loves in books there can
be no mistake. They were, and remain, the dearest of all; after boyhood
the bloom is off the literary rye. The first parcel of these garrulities
ended when the author left school, at about the age of seventeen. One's
literary equipment seems to have been then almost as complete as it ever
will be, one's tastes definitely formed, one's favourites already chosen.
As long as we live we hope to read, but we never can "recapture the first
fine careless rapture."