In an old note-book I jotted down such a list—­“things I hope to know, and to know well.”  I was then four and twenty.  Reading it with the eyes of fifty-four, I must needs laugh.  There appear such modest items as “The history of the Christian Church up to the Reformation”—­“all Greek poetry”—­“The field of Mediaeval Romance”—­“German literature from Lessing to Heine”—­“Dante!” Not one of these shall I ever “know, and know well”; not any one of them.  Yet here I am buying books which lead me into endless paths of new temptation.  What have I to do with Egypt?  Yet I have been beguiled by Flinders Petrie and by Maspero.  How can I pretend to meddle with the ancient geography of Asia Minor?  Yet here have I bought Prof.  Ramsay’s astonishing book, and have even read with a sort of troubled enjoyment a good many pages of it; troubled, because I have but to reflect a moment, and I see that all this kind of thing is mere futile effort of the intellect when the time for serious intellectual effort is over.

It all means, of course, that, owing to defective opportunity, owing, still more perhaps, to lack of method and persistence, a possibility that was in me has been wasted, lost.  My life has been merely tentative, a broken series of false starts and hopeless new beginnings.  If I allowed myself to indulge that mood, I could revolt against the ordinance which allows me no second chance. O mihi praeteritos referat si Jupiter annos!  If I could but start again, with only the experience there gained!  I mean, make a new beginning of my intellectual life; nothing else, O heaven! nothing else.  Even amid poverty, I could do so much better; keeping before my eyes some definite, some not unattainable, good; sternly dismissing the impracticable, the wasteful.

And, in doing so, become perhaps an owl-eyed pedant, to whom would be for ever dead the possibility of such enjoyment as I know in these final years.  Who can say?  Perhaps the sole condition of my progress to this state of mind and heart which make my happiness was that very stumbling and erring which I so regret.

XVII.

Why do I give so much of my time to the reading of history?  Is it in any sense profitable to me?  What new light can I hope for on the nature of man?  What new guidance for the direction of my own life through the few years that may remain to me?  But it is with no such purpose that I read these voluminous books; they gratify—­or seem to gratify—­a mere curiosity; and scarcely have I closed a volume, when the greater part of what I have read in it is forgotten.