literature. From that day onwards you may return to your crudities,
but at least you do so with some standard of comparison in your
mind. You can never be the same as you were before. Then gradually
the good thing becomes more dear to you; it builds itself up with
your growing mind; it becomes a part of your better self, and so, at
last, you can look, as I do now, at the old covers and love them for
all that they have meant in the past. Yes, it was the olive-green
line of Scott's novels which started me on to rhapsody. They were
the first books I ever owned--long, long before I could appreciate
or even understand them. But at last I realized what a treasure they
were. In my boyhood I read them by surreptitious candle-ends in the
dead of the night, when the sense of crime added a new zest to the
story. Perhaps you have observed that my "Ivanhoe" is of a different
edition from the others. The first copy was left in the grass by the
side of a stream, fell into the water, and was eventually picked up
three days later, swollen and decomposed, upon a mud-bank. I think I
may say, however, that I had worn it out before I lost it. Indeed,
it was perhaps as well that it was some years before it was
replaced, for my instinct was always to read it again instead of
breaking fresh ground.

I remember the late James Payn telling the anecdote that he and two
literary friends agreed to write down what scene in fiction they
thought the most dramatic, and that on examining the papers it was
found that all three had chosen the same. It was the moment when
the unknown knight, at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, riding past the pavilions
of the lesser men, strikes with the sharp end of his lance, in a
challenge to mortal combat, the shield of the formidable Templar.
It was, indeed, a splendid moment! What matter that no Templar was
allowed by the rules of his Order to take part in so secular and