that they had lived in the times of which the author treated, and had a personal acquaintance with every human being who was mentioned in his pages.  Pepys, Addison, Horace Walpole, Dr. Johnson, Madame de Genlis, the Duc de St. Simon, and the several societies in which those worthies moved, excited in their minds precisely the same sort of concern, and gave matter for discussions of exactly the same type, as most people bestow upon the proceedings of their own contemporaries.  The past was to them as the present, and the fictitious as the actual.  The older novels, which had been the food of their early years, had become part of themselves to such an extent that, in speaking to each other, they frequently employed sentences from dialogues in those novels to express the idea, or even the business, of the moment.  On matters of the street or of the household they would use the very language of Mrs. Elton and Mrs. Bennet, Mr. Woodhouse, Mr. Collins, and John Thorpe, and the other inimitable actors on Jane Austen’s unpretending stage:  while they would debate the love affairs and the social relations of their own circle in a series of quotations from Sir Charles Grandison or Evelina.

The effect was at times nothing less than bewildering.  When Lady Trevelyan married, her husband, whose reading had lain anywhere rather than among the circulating libraries, used at first to wonder who the extraordinary people could be with whom his wife and his brother-in-law appeared to have lived.  This style of thought and conversation had for young minds a singular and a not unhealthy fascination.  Lady Trevelyan’s children were brought up among books, (to use the homely simile of an American author), as a stable-boy among horses.  The shelves of the library, instead of frowning on us as we played and talked, seemed alive with kindly and familiar faces.  But death came, and came again, and then all was changed, and changed as in an instant.  There were many favourite volumes out of which the spirit seemed to vanish at once and for ever.  We endeavoured unsuccessfully to revive by our own efforts the amusement which we had been taught to find in the faded flatteries and absurdities that passed between Miss Seward and her admirers, or to retrace for ourselves the complications of female jealousy which played round Cowper’s tea-table at Olney.  We awoke to the discovery that the charm was not in us, nor altogether in the books themselves.  The talisman, which endowed with life and meaning all that it touched, had passed away from among us, leaving recollections which are our most cherished, as they must ever be our proudest, possession.