ocence, when no
grossness of suggestion has a meaning, though the mind is fully open
to the reception of all the reader's own experience teaches him to
understand.

I suppose I am going to say a Scythian sort of thing, but I do not
remember any very keen or special pleasure in my first encounter with
Shakespeare. Perhaps it came when I was too young; but at first the
impression made upon me was certainly much inferior to that produced
by Mr Percy B. St John, and he was only one of that assembly of
wonder-workers of whom the nameless hacks of _Reynolds'_ and _Bow Bells_
were members. When it began to dawn upon me that the spell he exercised
was of another kind, I cannot tell. I suppose that the conception of his
greatness slowly expanded with the expanding mind; but I know that I had
come to young manhood before any special sense of wonder dawned.

After that first discovery of the power to read at all, which came with
the _Mandans Revenge_, the one salient thing in memory is the
sudden finding of Carlyle's _Heroes_ and _Sartor Resartus_. Some
literary-minded compositor in my father's employ had placed the book in
a rack of type-cases, and had apparently forgotten it. It bore on many
pages the stamp of some Young Men's Christian Association in a Northern
town, and my literary-minded compositor seems to have looted it. It
was my most valued possession for some years. It was, no doubt, a very
obvious duty to return it to the institution whose inscription it bore,
but I do not think the idea ever presented itself to me.

How shall I speak of the extraordinary emotions which were excited in
my mind at a chance opening of the pages at the first chapter of the
_Sartor_? The hurling satire of the opening paragraph--the torch of
learning having so illuminated every cranny and dog-hole in the universe
that the creation of the world had now become no more mysterious than
the making of a dumpling, though concerning this last there were still
some to whom the question as to how the apples were got in presented an
insoluble problem--this seized me with an amazement of pleasure. I do
not mean to say a presumptuous thing at all; but it is a simple fact
that from this first beginning of acquaintance with Carlyle, he never
once appeared to teach me anything in the way of thought. I know he did
so; I know that he profoundly coloured the fountains of my mind for many
years; that long and long after the experience I am recording, I though