Buskins of shells, all silver’d, used she,
  And branch’d with blushing coral to the knee,
  Where sparrows perched, of hollow pearl and gold,
  Such as the world would wonder to behold,—­

so it went on, and I thought I had never read anything so lovely,—­

  Amorous Leander, beautiful and young,
  Whose tragedy divine Musaeus sung,—­

it all seemed to my fancy intoxicating beyond anything I had ever even dreamed of, since I had not yet become acquainted with any of the modern romanticists.

When I reached home, tired out with enthusiasm and exercise, I must needs, so soon as I had eaten, search out my stepmother that she might be a partner in my joys.  It is remarkable to me now, and a disconcerting proof of my still almost infantile innocence, that, having induced her to settle to her knitting, I began, without hesitation, to read Marlowe’s voluptuous poem aloud to that blameless Christian gentlewoman.  We got on very well in the opening, but at the episode of Cupid’s pining, my stepmother’s needles began nervously to clash, and when we launched on the description of Leander’s person, she interrupted me by saying, rather sharply, ’Give me that book, please, I should like to read the rest to myself.’  I resigned the reading in amazement, and was stupefied to see her take the volume, shut it with a snap and hide it under her needlework.  Nor could I extract from her another word on the subject.

The matter passed from my mind, and I was therefore extremely alarmed when, soon after my going to bed that night, my Father came into my room with a pale face and burning eyes, the prey of violent perturbation.  He set down the candle and stood by the bed, and it was some time before he could resolve on a form of speech.  Then he denounced me, in unmeasured terms, for bringing into the house, for possessing at all or reading, so abominable a book.  He explained that my stepmother had shown it to him, and that he had looked through it, and had burned it.

The sentence in his tirade which principally affected me was this.  He said, ’You will soon be leaving us, and going up to lodgings in London, and if your landlady should come into your room, and find such a book lying about, she would immediately set you down as a profligate.’  I did not understand this at all, and it seems to me now that the fact that I had so very simply and childishly volunteered to read the verses to my stepmother should have proved to my Father that I connected it with no ideas of an immoral nature.

I was greatly wounded and offended, but my indignation was smothered up in the alarm and excitement which followed the news that I was to go up to live in lodgings, and, as it was evident, alone, in London.  Of this no hint or whisper had previously reached me.  On reflection, I can but admit that my Father, who was little accustomed to seventeenth-century literature, must have come across some startling exposures in Ben Jonson, and probably never reached ‘Hero and Leander’ at all.  The artistic effect of such poetry on an innocently pagan mind did not come within the circle of his experience.  He judged the outspoken Elizabethan poets, no doubt, very much in the spirit of the problematical landlady.