I do not think I yet felt the beauty of the literature which made them all live in my fancy, that I conceived of Goldsmith as an artist using for my rapture the finest of the arts; and yet I had been taught to see the loveliness of poetry, and was already trying to make it on my own poor account.  I tried to make verses like those I listened to when my father read Moore and Scott to my mother, but I heard them with no such happiness as I read my beloved histories, though I never thought then of attempting to write like Goldsmith.  I accepted his beautiful work as ignorantly as I did my other blessings.  I was concerned in getting at the Greeks and Romans, and I did not know through what nimble air and by what lovely ways I was led to them.  Some retrospective perception of this came long afterward when I read his essays, and after I knew all of his poetry, and later yet when I read the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’; but for the present my eyes were holden, as the eyes of a boy mostly are in the world of art.  What I wanted with my Greeks and Romans after I got at them was to be like them, or at least to turn them to account in verse, and in dramatic verse at that.  The Romans were less civilized than the Greeks, and so were more like boys, and more to a boy’s purpose.  I did not make literature of the Greeks, but I got a whole tragedy out of the Romans; it was a rhymed tragedy, and in octosyllabic verse, like the “Lady of the Lake.”  I meant it to be acted by my schoolmates, but I am not sure that I ever made it known to them.  Still, they were not ignorant of my reading, and I remember how proud I was when a certain boy, who had always whipped me when we fought together, and so outranked me in that little boys’ world, once sent to ask me the name of the Roman emperor who lamented at nightfall, when he had done nothing worthy, that he had lost a day.  The boy was going to use the story, in a composition, as we called the school themes then, and I told him the emperor’s name; I could not tell him now without turning to the book.

My reading gave me no standing among the boys, and I did not expect it to rank me with boys who were more valiant in fight or in play; and I have since found that literature gives one no more certain station in the world of men’s activities, either idle or useful.  We literary folk try to believe that it does, but that is all nonsense.  At every period of life, among boys or men, we are accepted when they are at leisure, and want to be amused, and at best we are tolerated rather than accepted.  I must have told the boys stories out of my Goldsmith’s Greece and Rome, or it would not have been known that I had read them, but I have no recollection now of doing so, while I distinctly remember rehearsing the allegories and fables of the ‘Gesta Romanorum’, a book which seems to have been in my hands about the same time or a little later.  I had a delight in that stupid collection of monkish legends which I cannot account for now, and which persisted in spite of the nightmare confusion it made of my ancient Greeks and Romans.  They were not at all the ancient Greeks and Romans of Goldsmith’s histories.