Oh! what a privilege to
be able to let this hump, like Christian's burthen, drop from off one's
back, and transport one's-self, by the help of a little musty duodecimo,
to the time when "ignorance was bliss," and when we first got a peep at
the raree-show of the world, through the glass of fiction--gazing at
mankind, as we do at wild beasts in a menagerie, through the bars of their
cages,--or at curiosities in a museum, that we must not touch! For myself,
not only are the old ideas of the contents of the work brought back to my
mind in all their vividness, but the old associations of the faces and
persons of those I then knew, as they were in their lifetime--the place
where I sat to read the volume, the day when I got it, the feeling of the
air, the fields, the sky--return, and all my early impressions with them.
This is better to me--those places, those times, those persons, and those
feelings that come across me as I retrace the story and devour the page,
are to me better far than the wet sheets of the last new novel from the
Ballantyne press, to say nothing of the Minerva press in
Leadenhall-street. It is like visiting the scenes of early youth. I think
of the time "when I was in my father's house, and my path ran down with
butter and honey,"--when I was a little, thoughtless child, and had no
other wish or care but to con my daily task, and be happy!--Tom Jones, I
remember, was the first work that broke the spell. It came down in numbers
once a fortnight, in Cooke's pocket-edition, embellished with cuts. I had
hitherto read only in school-books, and a tiresome ecclesiastical history
(with the exception of Mrs. Radcliffe's Romance of the Forest): but this
had a different relish with it,--"sweet in the mouth," though not "bitter
in the belly." It smacked of the world I lived in, and in which I was to
live--and shewed me groups, "gay creatures" not "of the element," but of
the earth; not "living in the clouds," but travelling the same road that I
did;--some that had passed on before me, and others that might soon
overtake me. My heart had palpitated at the thoughts of a boarding-school
ball, or gala-day at Midsummer or Christmas: but the world I had found out
in Cooke's edition of the British Novelists was to me a dance through
life, a perpetual gala-day. The six-penny numbers of this work regularly
contrived to leave off just in the middle of a sentence, and in the nick
of a story, where Tom Jones discovers Square behind