try of Sir Walter Scott, my stepmother
asked my Father whether I might not start reading the Waverley
Novels. But he refused to permit this, on the ground that those
tales gave false and disturbing pictures of life, and would lead
away my attention from heavenly things. I do not fully apprehend
what distinction he drew between the poems, which he permitted,
and the novels, which he refused. But I suppose he regarded a
work in verse as more artificial, and therefore less likely to
make a realistic impression, than one in prose. There is
something quaint in the conscientious scruple which allows _The
Lord of the Isles_ and excludes _Rob Roy_.

But stranger still, and amounting almost to a whim, was his
sudden decision that, although I might not touch the novels of
Scott, I was free to read those of Dickens. I recollect that my
stepmother showed some surprise at this, and that my Father
explained to her that Dickens 'exposes the passion of love in a
ridiculous light.' She did not seem to follow this
recommendation, which indeed tends to the ultra-subtle, but she
procured for me a copy of _Pickwick_, by which I was instantly and
gloriously enslaved. My shouts of laughing at the richer passages
were almost scandalous, and led to my being reproved for
disturbing my Father while engaged, in an upper room, in the
study of God's Word. I must have expended months on the perusal
of _Pickwick_, for I used to rush through a chapter, and then read
it over again very slowly, word for word, and then shut my eyes
to realize the figures and the action.

I suppose no child will ever again enjoy that rapture of
unresisting humorous appreciation of 'Pickwick'. I felt myself to
be in the company of a gentleman so extremely funny that I began
to laugh before he began to speak; no sooner did he remark 'the
sky was dark and gloomy, the air was damp and raw,' than I was in
fits of hilarity. My retirement in our sequestered corner of life
made me, perhaps, even in this matter, somewhat old-fashioned,
and possibly I was the latest of the generation who accepted Mr.
Pickwick with an unquestioning and hysterical abandonment.
Certainly few young people now seem sensitive, as I was, and as
thousands before me had been, to the quality of his fascination.

It was curious that living in a household where a certain
delicate art of painting was diligently cultivated, I had yet
never seen a real picture, and was scarcely familiar with the
design of on