right deep down into the soul.

However, all this has nothing to do with Macaulay's glorious lays,
save that when you want some flowers of manliness and patriotism you
can pluck quite a bouquet out of those. I had the good fortune to
learn the Lay of Horatius off by heart when I was a child, and it
stamped itself on my plastic mind, so that even now I can reel off
almost the whole of it. Goldsmith said that in conversation he was
like the man who had a thousand pounds in the bank, but could not
compete with the man who had an actual sixpence in his pocket. So
the ballad that you bear in your mind outweighs the whole bookshelf
which waits for reference. But I want you now to move your eye a
little farther down the shelf to the line of olive-green volumes.
That is my edition of Scott. But surely I must give you a little
breathing space before I venture upon them.



II.


It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good
books which are your very own. You may not appreciate them at first.
You may pine for your novel of crude and unadulterated adventure.
You may, and will, give it the preference when you can. But the dull
days come, and the rainy days come, and always you are driven to
fill up the chinks of your reading with the worthy books which wait
so patiently for your notice. And then suddenly, on a day which
marks an epoch in your life, you understand the difference. You see,
like a flash, how the one stands for nothing, and the other for