in which she found herself entirely at home. The feeling with which
Macaulay and his sister regarded books differed from that of other
people in kind rather than in degree. When they were discoursing
together about a work of history or biography, a bystander would have
supposed that they had lived in the times of which the author treated,
and had a personal acquaintance with every human being who was mentioned
in his pages. Pepys, Addison, Horace Walpole, Dr. Johnson, Madame de
Genlis, the Duc de St. Simon, and the several societies in which those
worthies moved, excited in their minds precisely the same sort of
concern, and gave matter for discussions of exactly the same type, as
most people bestow upon the proceedings of their own contemporaries. The
past was to them as the present, and the fictitious as the actual. The
older novels, which had been the food of their early years, had become
part of themselves to such an extent that, in speaking to each other,
they frequently employed sentences from dialogues in those novels to
express the idea, or even the business, of the moment. On matters of
the street or of the household they would use the very language of Mrs.
Elton and Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Woodhouse, Mr. Collins, and John Thorpe, and
the other inimitable actors on Jane Austen's unpretending stage: while
they would debate the love affairs and the social relations of their own
circle in a series of quotations from Sir Charles Grandison or Evelina.

The effect was at times nothing less than bewildering. When Lady
Trevelyan married, her husband, whose reading had lain anywhere rather
than among the circulating libraries, used at first to wonder who the
extraordinary people could be with whom his wife and his brother-in-law
appeared to have lived. This style of thought and conversation had for
young minds a singular and a not unhealthy fascination. Lady Trevelyan's
children were brought up among books, (to use the homely simile of
an American author), as a stable-boy among horses. The shelves of the
library, instead of frowning on us as we played and talked, seemed alive
with kindly and familiar faces. But death came, and came again, and then
all was changed, and changed as in an instant. There were many favourite
volumes out of which the spirit seemed to vanish at once and for ever.
We endeavoured unsuccessfully to revive by our own efforts the amusement
which we had been taught to find in the faded flatteries and absurd