te some halting stanzas. Thus
I lived with words. And what I thus wrote was for no ulterior use, it
was written consciously for practice. It was not so much that I wished
to be an author (though I wished that too) as that I had vowed that I
would learn to write. That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I
practised to acquire it, as men learn to whittle, in a wager with
myself. Description was the principal field of my exercise; for to any
one with senses there is always something worth describing, and town and
country are but one continuous subject. But I worked in other ways also;
often accompanied my walks with dramatic dialogues, in which I played
many parts; and often exercised myself in writing down conversations
from memory.

This was all excellent, no doubt; so were the diaries I sometimes tried
to keep, but always and very speedily discarded, finding them a school
of posturing and melancholy self-deception. And yet this was not the
most efficient part of my training. Good though it was, it only taught
me (so far as I have learned them at all) the lower and less
intellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential note and
the right word: things that to a happier constitution had perhaps come
by nature. And regarded as training, it had one grave defect; for it set
me no standard of achievement. So that there was perhaps more profit, as
there was certainly more effort, in my secret labours at home. Whenever
I read a book or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a
thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety, in which there was
either some conspicuous force or some happy distinction in the style, I
must sit down at once and set myself to ape that quality. I was
unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again
unsuccessful, and always unsuccessful; but at least in these vain bouts
I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in construction and the
co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt,
to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to
Montaigne, to Baudelaire, and to Obermann. I remember one of these
monkey tricks, which was called "The Vanity of Morals": it was to have
had a second part, "The Vanity of Knowledge"; and as I had neither
morality nor scholarship, the names were apt; but the second part was
never attempted, and the first part was written (which is my reason for
recalling it, ghostlike, from its ashes) no les