constant than
those which I entertained as a poet. By governesses and other
instructors, Wordsworth and Tennyson were obtruded on me as models of
beauty and edification. Wordsworth I thought ridiculous. Tennyson seemed
to me unmanly and mawkish. The poets I found out for myself were Dryden
and, more particularly, Pope; and when I was about fourteen I imagined
myself destined to win back for Pope, as a model, the supremacy he had
unfortunately lost, while the sentimentalities of Tennyson and his
followers would disappear like the fripperies of faded and outworn
fashions.

When my father and his family migrated from the banks of the Exe to
Denbury these literary projects found fresh means of expanding
themselves. Opposite the front door of the Manor House was a large and
antique _annexe_, once occupied by a bailiff who managed the home farm.
This my grandfather had intended to connect with the main building, by
which means the Manor House would have been nearly doubled in size. His
scheme was not carried out. The _annexe_, covered with increasing
growths of ivy, remained locked up and isolated, and for many years
stood empty. But on the Archdeacon's death, and the removal of his
household from Dartington, a use was at last found for it. The upper
rooms were converted into a temporary storehouse for his library--large
rooms which now were lined with shelves, and in which fires were
frequently lighted to keep the volumes dry. In a moment of happy
inspiration I obtained permission to look after the fires myself. The
key was placed in my possession. Day by day I entered. I locked myself
in, and all the world was before me.

I had often before been irritated, and my curiosity had been continually
piqued, by finding that certain books--most of them plays of the time of
Charles II--would be taken away from me and secreted if I happened to
have abstracted some such stray volume from a bookcase; but here I was
my own master. My grandfather's library was, as I have said already,
particularly rich in literature of this semiforbidden class, and rows of
plays and poems by Congreve, Etheridge, Rochester, Dryden, and their
contemporaries offered themselves to my study, as though by some furtive
assignation. Among other wrecks of furniture with which the worm-eaten
floors were encumbered was an old and battered rocking-horse, bestriding
which I studied these secret volumes, and found in it an enchanted steed
which would lift me into th