Nothing perhaps, is so invaluable to a young man on entering life as the friendship of a pure-minded and highly-cultivated woman who, removed too far above him to be regarded with passion, is yet beautiful enough to engage his admiration; whose good opinion becomes the measure of his own self-respect; and whose confidence is a sacred trust only to be parted from with loss of life or honor.

Such an influence upon myself at this time was the friendship of Madame de Courcelles.  I went out from her presence that morning morally stronger than before, and at each repetition of my visit I found her influence strengthen and increase.  Sometimes I met Monsieur de Caylus, on which occasions my stay was ever of the briefest; but I most frequently found her alone, and then our talk was of books, of art, of culture, of all those high and stirring things that alike move the sympathies of the educated woman and rouse the enthusiasm of the young man.  She became interested in me; at first for Dalrymple’s sake, and by-and-by, however little I deserved it, for my own—­and she showed that interest in many ways inexpressibly valuable to me then and thenceforth.  She took pains to educate my taste; opened to me hitherto unknown avenues of study; led me to explore “fresh fields and pastures new,” to which, but for her help, I might not have found my way for many a year to come.  My reading, till now, had been almost wholly English or classical; she sent me to the old French literature—­to the Chansons de Geste; to the metrical romances of the Trouveres; to the Chronicles of Froissart, Monstrelet, and Philip de Comines, and to the poets and dramatists that immediately succeeded them.

These books opened a new world to me; and, having daily access to two fine public libraries, I plunged at once into a course of new and delightful reading, ranging over all that fertile tract of song and history that begins far away in the morning land of mediaeval romance, and leads on, century after century, to the new era that began with the Revolution.

With what avidity I devoured those picturesque old chronicles—­those autobiographies—­those poems, and satires, and plays that I now read for the first time!  What evenings I spent with St. Simon, and De Thou, and Charlotte de Baviere!  How I relished Voltaire!  How I laughed over Moliere!  How I revelled in Montaigne!  Most of all, however, I loved the quaint lore of the earlier literature:—­

     “Old legends of the monkish page,
      Traditions of the saint and sage,
      Tales that have the rime of age,
       And Chronicles of Eld.”

Nor was this all.  I had hitherto loved art as a child or a savage might love it, ignorantly, half-blindly, without any knowledge of its principles, its purposes, or its history.  But Madame de Courcelles put into my hands certain books that opened my eyes to a thousand wonders unseen before.  The works of Vasari, Nibby, Winkelman and Lessing, the aesthetic writings of Goethe and the Schlegels, awakened in me, one after the other, fresher and deeper revelations of beauty.