engaged upon something in the nature of autobiography, or, perhaps
worse, upon a chapter in the life of that little, beautiful brother
whom we once all had, and whom we have all lost and mourned, the
man we ought to have been, the man we hoped to be. But when word
has been passed (even to an editor), it should, if possible, be
kept; and if sometimes I am wise and say too little, and sometimes
weak and say too much, the blame must lie at the door of the person
who entrapped me.

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are
works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he
must afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach him a
lesson, which he must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they
rearrange, they clarify the lessons of life; they disengage us from
ourselves, they constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and
they show us the web of experience, not as we can see it for
ourselves, but with a singular change--that monstrous, consuming
ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be so, they must
be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is so
serves the turn of instruction. But the course of our education is
answered best by those poems and romances where we breathe a
magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet generous and pious
characters. Shakespeare has served me best. Few living friends
have had upon me an influence so strong for good as Hamlet or
Rosalind. The last character, already well beloved in the reading,
I had the good fortune to see, I must think, in an impressionable
hour, played by Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved,
more delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence quite
passed away. Kent's brief speech over the dying Lear had a great
effect upon my mind, and was the burthen of my reflections for