ossessed a copy of Bailey's 'Etymological Dictionary', a
book published early in the eighteenth century. Over this I would
pore for hours, playing with the words in a fashion which I can
no longer reconstruct, and delighting in the savour of the rich,
old-fashioned country phrases. My Father finding me thus
employed, fell to wondering at the nature of my pursuit, and I
could offer him, indeed, no very intelligible explanation of it.
He urged me to give up such idleness, and to make practical use
of language. For this purpose he conceived an exercise which he
obliged me to adopt, although it was hateful to me. He sent me
forth, it might be, up the lane to Warbury Hill and round home by
the copses; or else down one chine to the sea and along the
shingle to the next cutting in the cliff, and so back by way of
the village; and he desired me to put down, in language as full
as I could, all that I had seen in each excursion. As I have
said, this practice was detestable and irksome to me, but, as I
look back, I am inclined to believe it to have been the most
salutary, the most practical piece of training which my Father
ever gave me. It forced me to observe sharply and clearly, to
form visual impressions, to retain them in the brain, and to
clothe them in punctilious and accurate language.

It was in my fifteenth year that I became again, this time
intelligently, acquainted with Shakespeare. I got hold of a
single play, _The Tempest_, in a school edition, prepared, I
suppose, for one of the university examinations which were then
being instituted in the provinces. This I read through and
through, not disdaining the help of the notes, and revelling in
the glossary. I studied _The Tempest_ as I had hitherto studied no
classic work, and it filled my whole being with music and
romance. This book was my own hoarded possession; the rest of
Shakespeare's works were beyond my hopes. But gradually I
contrived to borrow a volume here and a volume there. I completed
_The Merchant of Venice_, read _Cymbeline_, _Julius Caesar_ and _Much
Ado_; most of the others, I think, remained closed to me for a
long time. But these were enough to steep my horizon with all the
colours of sunrise. It was due, no doubt, to my bringing up, that
the plays never appealed to me as bounded by the exigencies of a
stage or played by actors. The images they raised in my mind were
of real people moving in the open air, and uttering, in the
natural play of life,