The Count bore his honors very calmly, though every week some fresh feat of bodily strength or daring kept adding to his popularity.  It was no slight temptation to his vanity; for, as some one has said truly, no successful adventurer in after-life ever wins such undivided admiration and hearty partisans as a school hero.  The prestige of the liberator among the Irish peasantry comes nearest to it, I think; or the feeling of a clan, a hundred years ago, toward their chief.  It must be very pleasant to be quoted so incessantly and believed in so implicitly, and to know that your decisions are so absolutely without appeal.  From that first day when he interfered in my favor, Guy never ceased to accord me the aegis of his protection, and it served me well; for, then as now, I was strong neither in body nor nerve.  Yet our tastes, save in one respect, were as dissimilar as can be imagined.  The solitary conformity was, that we were both, in a desultory way, fond of reading, and our favorite books were the same.  Neither would do more school-work than was absolutely necessary, but at light literature of a certain class we read hard.

I don’t think Guy’s was what is usually called a poetical temperament, for his taste in this line was quite one-sided.  He was no admirer of the picturesque, certainly.  I have heard him say that his idea of a country to live in was where there was no hill steep enough to wind a horse in good condition, and no wood that hounds could not run through in fifteen minutes; therein following the fancy of that eminent French philosopher, who, being invited to climb Ben Lomond to enjoy the most magnificent of views, responded meekly, “Aimez-vous les beautes de la Nature?  Pour moi, je les abhorre.”  Can you not fancy the strident emphasis on the last syllable, revealing how often the poor materialist had been victimized before he made a stand at last?

All through Livingstone’s life the real was to predominate over the ideal; and so it was at this period of it.  He had a great dislike to purely sentimental or descriptive poetry, preferring to all others those battle-ballads, like the Lays of Rome, which stir the blood like a trumpet, or those love-songs which heat it like rough strong wine.

He was very fond of Homer, too.  He liked the diapason of those sonorous hexameters, that roll on, sinking and swelling with the ebb and flow of a stormy sea.  I hear his voice—­deep-toned and powerful even at that early age—­finishing the story of Poseidon and his beautiful prize—­their bridal-bed laid in the hollow of a curling wave—­

     "Porphureon d’ ara kuma peristathe, ourei ison,
     Kurtothen, krupsen de Theon thneten te gunaika."

And yet they say that the glorious old Sciote was a myth, and the Odyssey a magazine worked out by clever contributors.  They might as well assert that all his marshals would have made up one Napoleon.

I remember how we used to pass in review the beauties of old time, for whom “many drew swords and died,” whose charms convulsed kingdoms and ruined cities, who called the stars after their own names.