My stepmother brought with her a little library of such books as we had not previously seen, but which yet were known to all the world except us.  Prominent among these was a set of the poems of Walter Scott, and in his unwonted geniality and provisional spirit of compromise, my Father must do no less than read these works aloud to my stepmother in the quiet spring evenings.  This was a sort of aftermath of courtship, a tribute of song to his bride, very sentimental and pretty.  She would sit, sedately, at her workbox, while he, facing her, poured forth the verses at her like a blackbird.  I was not considered in this arrangement, which was wholly matrimonial, but I was present, and the exercise made more impression upon me than it did upon either of the principal agents.  My Father read the verse admirably, with a full,—­some people (but not I) might say with a too full—­perception of the metre as well as of the rhythm, rolling out the rhymes, and glorying in the proper names.  He began, and it was a happy choice, with ‘The Lady of the Lake’.  It gave me singular pleasure to hear his large voice do justice to ‘Duncrannon’ and ’Cambus-Kenneth’, and wake the echoes with ’Rhoderigh Vich Alphine dhu, ho! ieroe!’ I almost gasped with excitement, while a shudder floated down my backbone, when we came to: 

  A sharp and shrieking echo gave,
  Coir-Uriskin, thy goblin cave! 
  And the grey pass where birches wave,
    On Beala-nam-bo,

a passage which seemed to me to achieve the ideal of sublime romance.  My thoughts were occupied all day long with the adventures of Fitzjames and the denizens of Ellen’s Isle.  It became an obsession, and when I was asked whether I remembered the name of the cottage where the minister of the Bible Christians lodged, I answered, dreamily, ‘Yes,—­Beala-nambo.’

Seeing me so much fascinated, thrown indeed into a temporary frenzy, by the epic poetry of Sir Walter Scott, my stepmother asked my Father whether I might not start reading the Waverley Novels.  But he refused to permit this, on the ground that those tales gave false and disturbing pictures of life, and would lead away my attention from heavenly things.  I do not fully apprehend what distinction he drew between the poems, which he permitted, and the novels, which he refused.  But I suppose he regarded a work in verse as more artificial, and therefore less likely to make a realistic impression, than one in prose.  There is something quaint in the conscientious scruple which allows The Lord of the Isles and excludes Rob Roy.

But stranger still, and amounting almost to a whim, was his sudden decision that, although I might not touch the novels of Scott, I was free to read those of Dickens.  I recollect that my stepmother showed some surprise at this, and that my Father explained to her that Dickens ’exposes the passion of love in a ridiculous light.’  She did not seem to follow this recommendation, which indeed tends