of a little essay these
princes are too much out of place, and I prefer to pay my fealty and
pass on. How often I have read "Guy Mannering," "Rob Roy," or
"Redgauntlet," I have no means of guessing, having begun young. But it
is either four or five times that I have read "The Egoist," and either
five or six that I have read the "Vicomte de Bragelonne."

Some, who would accept the others, may wonder that I should have spent
so much of this brief life of ours over a work so little famous as the
last. And, indeed, I am surprised myself; not at my own devotion, but
the coldness of the world. My acquaintance with the "Vicomte" began,
somewhat indirectly, in the year of grace 1863, when I had the advantage
of studying certain illustrated dessert plates in a hotel at Nice. The
name of d'Artagnan in the legends I already saluted like an old friend,
for I had met it the year before in a work of Miss Yonge's. My first
perusal was in one of those pirated editions that swarmed at that time
out of Brussels, and ran to such a troop of neat and dwarfish volumes. I
understood but little of the merits of the book; my strongest memory is
of the execution of d'Eymeric and Lyodot--a strange testimony to the
dulness of a boy, who could enjoy the rough-and-tumble in the Place de
Greve, and forget d'Artagnan's visits to the two financiers. My next
reading was in winter-time, when I lived alone upon the Pentlands. I
would return in the early night from one of my patrols with the
shepherd; a friendly face would meet me in the door, a friendly
retriever scurry upstairs to fetch my slippers; and I would sit down
with the "Vicomte" for a long, silent, solitary lamp-lit evening by the
fire. And yet I know not why I call it silent, when it was enlivened
with such a clatter of horse-shoes, and such a rattle of musketry, and
such a stir of talk; or why I call those evenings solitary in which I
gained so many friends. I would rise from my book and pull the blind
aside, and see the snow and the glittering hollies chequer a Scottish
garden, and the winter moonlight brighten the white hills. Thence I
would turn again to that crowded and sunny field of life in which it was
so easy to forget myself, my cares, and my surroundings: a place busy as
a city, bright as a theatre, thronged with memorable faces, and sounding
with delightful speech. I carried the thread of that epic into my
slumbers, I woke with it unbroken, I rejoiced to plunge into the book
again