I had in me the making of a scholar.  With leisure and tranquillity of mind, I should have amassed learning.  Within the walls of a college, I should have lived so happily, so harmlessly, my imagination ever busy with the old world.  In the introduction to his History of France, Michelet says:  “J’ai passe a cote du monde, et j’ai pris l’histoire pour la vie.”  That, as I can see now, was my true ideal; through all my battlings and miseries I have always lived more in the past than in the present.  At the time when I was literally starving in London, when it seemed impossible that I should ever gain a living by my pen, how many days have I spent at the British Museum, reading as disinterestedly as if I had been without a care!  It astounds me to remember that, having breakfasted on dry bread, and carrying in my pocket another piece of bread to serve for dinner, I settled myself at a desk in the great Reading-Room with books before me which by no possibility could be a source of immediate profit.  At such a time, I worked through German tomes on Ancient Philosophy.  At such a time, I read Appuleius and Lucian, Petronius and the Greek Anthology, Diogenes Laertius and—­heaven knows what!  My hunger was forgotten; the garret to which I must return to pass the night never perturbed my thoughts.  On the whole, it seems to me something to be rather proud of; I smile approvingly at that thin, white-faced youth.  Me?  My very self?  No, no!  He has been dead these thirty years.

Scholarship in the high sense was denied me, and now it is too late.  Yet here am I gloating over Pausanias, and promising myself to read every word of him.  Who that has any tincture of old letters would not like to read Pausanias, instead of mere quotations from him and references to him?  Here are the volumes of Dahn’s Die Konige der Germanen:  who would not like to know all he can about the Teutonic conquerors of Rome?  And so on, and so on.  To the end I shall be reading—­and forgetting.  Ah, that’s the worst of it!  Had I at command all the knowledge I have at any time possessed, I might call myself a learned man.  Nothing surely is so bad for the memory as long-enduring worry, agitation, fear.  I cannot preserve more than a few fragments of what I read, yet read I shall, persistently, rejoicingly.  Would I gather erudition for a future life?  Indeed, it no longer troubles me that I forget.  I have the happiness of the passing moment, and what more can mortal ask?

XVIII.

Is it I, Henry Ryecroft, who, after a night of untroubled rest, rise unhurriedly, dress with the deliberation of an oldish man, and go downstairs happy in the thought that I can sit reading, quietly reading, all day long?  Is it I, Henry Ryecroft, the harassed toiler of so many a long year?