Besides, one begins to write, and that is fatal.
My own first essays were composed at school--for other boys. Not long
ago the gentleman who was then our English master wrote to me, informing
me he was my earliest public, and that he had never credited my younger
brother with the essays which that unscrupulous lad ("I speak of him but
brotherly") was accustomed to present for his consideration.

On leaving school at seventeen I went to St. Leonard's Hall, in the
University of St. Andrews. That is the oldest of Scotch universities,
and was founded by a papal bull. St. Leonard's Hall, after having been a
_hospitium_ for pilgrims, a home for old ladies (about 1500), and a
college in the University, was now a kind of cross between a master's
house at school, and, as before 1750, a college. We had more liberty
than schoolboys, less than English undergraduates. In the Scotch
universities the men live scattered, in lodgings, and only recently, at
St. Andrews, have they begun to dine together in hall. We had a common
roof, common dinners, wore scarlet gowns, possessed football and cricket
clubs, and started, of course, a kind of weekly magazine. It was only a
manuscript affair, and was profusely illustrated. For the only time in
my life, I was now an editor, under a sub-editor, who kept me up to my
work, and cut out my fine passages. The editor's duty was to write most
of the magazine--to write essays, reviews (of books by the professors,
very severe), novels, short stories, poems, translations, also to
illustrate these, and to "fag" his friends for "copy" and drawings. A
deplorable flippancy seems, as far as one remembers, to have been the
chief characteristic of the periodical--flippancy and an abundant use of
the supernatural. These were the days of Lord' Lytton's "Strange Story,"
which I continue to think a most satisfactory romance. Inspired by Lord
Lytton, and aided by the University library, I read Cornelius Agrippa,
Trithemius, Petrus de Abano, Michael Scott, and struggled with Iamblichus
and Plotinus.

These are really but disappointing writers. It soon became evident
enough that the devil was not to be raised by their prescriptions, that
the philosopher's stone was beyond the reach of the amateur. Iamblichus
is particularly obscure and tedious. To any young beginner I would
recommend Petrus de Abano, as the most adequate and gruesome of the
school, for "real deevilry and pleesure," while in the wildern