The wisdom of the authorities decided that I was to read no more novels, but, as an observer remarked, “I don’t see what is the use of preventing the boy from reading novels, for he’s just reading ‘Don Juan’ instead.”  This was so manifestly no improvement, that the ban on novels was tacitly withdrawn, or was permitted to become a dead letter.  They were far more enjoyable than Byron.  The worst that came of this was the suggestion of a young friend, whose life had been adventurous—­indeed he had served in the Crimea with the Bashi Bazouks—­that I should master the writings of Edgar Poe.  I do not think that the “Black Cat,” and the “Fall of the House of Usher,” and the “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” are very good reading for a boy who is not peculiarly intrepid.  Many a bad hour they gave me, haunting me, especially, with a fear of being prematurely buried, and of waking up before breakfast to find myself in a coffin.  Of all the books I devoured in that year, Poe is the only author whom I wish I had reserved for later consideration, and whom I cannot conscientiously recommend to children.

I had already enjoyed a sip of Thackeray, reading at a venture, in “Vanity Fair,” about the Battle of Waterloo.  It was not like Lever’s accounts of battles, but it was enchanting.  However, “Vanity Fair” was under a taboo.  It is not easy to say why; but Mr. Thackeray himself informed a small boy, whom he found reading “Vanity Fair” under the table, that he had better read something else.  What harm can the story do to a child?  He reads about Waterloo, about fat Jos, about little George and the pony, about little Rawdon and the rat-hunt, and is happy and unharmed.

Leaving my hermitage, and going into the very different and very disagreeable world of a master’s house, I was lucky enough to find a charming library there.  Most of Thackeray was on the shelves, and Thackeray became the chief enchanter.  As Henry Kingsley says, a boy reads him and thinks he knows all about life.  I do not think that the mundane parts, about Lady Kew and her wiles, about Ethel and the Marquis of Farintosh, appealed to one or enlightened one.  Ethel was a mystery, and not an interesting mystery, though one used to copy Doyle’s pictures of her, with the straight nose, the impossible eyes, the impossible waist.  It was not Ethel who captivated us; it was Clive’s youth and art, it was J. J., the painter, it was jolly F. B. and his address to the maid about the lobster.  “A finer fish, Mary, my dear, I have never seen.  Does not this solve the vexed question whether lobsters are fish, in the French sense?” Then “The Rose and the Ring” came out.  It was worth while to be twelve years old, when the Christmas books were written by Dickens and Thackeray.  I got hold of “The Rose and the Ring,” I know, and of the “Christmas Carol,” when they were damp from the press.  King Valoroso, and Bulbo, and Angelica were even more delightful than Scrooge, and Tiny Tim, and Trotty Veck.  One remembers the fairy monarch more vividly, and the wondrous array of egg-cups from which he sipped brandy—­or was it right Nantes?—­still “going on sipping, I am sorry to say,” even after “Valoroso was himself again.”