had slain.  He spoke like music.  I found it pathetic in spite of my knowing that the whole scene was lighted up by Bardolph’s nose.  When I was just bursting out crying—­for the deer’s tongue was lolling out and quick pantings were at his side; he had little ones at home—­Great Will remembered his engagement to sell Shylock a pound of the carcase; determined that no Jew should eat of it, he bethought him that Falstaff could well spare a pound, and he said the Jew would not see the difference:  Falstaff only got off by hard running and roaring out that he knew his unclean life would make him taste like pork and thus let the Jew into the trick.

My father related all this with such a veritable matter-of-fact air, and such liveliness—­he sounded the chase and its cries, and showed King Lear tottering, and Hamlet standing dark, and the vast substance of Falstaff—­that I followed the incidents excitedly, and really saw them, which was better than understanding them.  I required some help from him to see that Hamlet’s offer of a three-legged stool at a feverish moment of the chase, was laughable.  He taught me what to think of it by pitching Great Will’s voice high, and Hamlet’s very low.  By degrees I got some unconscious knowledge of the characters of Shakespeare.

There never was so fascinating a father as mine for a boy anything under eight or ten years old.  He could guess on Saturday whether I should name William Pitt on the Sunday; for, on those occasions, ‘Slender Billy,’ as I hope I am not irreverent in calling him, made up for the dulness of his high career with a raspberry-jam tart, for which, my father told me solemnly, the illustrious Minister had in his day a passion.  If I named him, my father would say, ’W.  P., otherwise S. B., was born in the year so-and-so; now,’ and he went to the cupboard, ’in the name of Politics, take this and meditate upon him.’  The shops being all shut on Sunday, he certainly bought it, anticipating me unerringly, on the Saturday, and, as soon as the tart appeared, we both shouted.  I fancy I remember his repeating a couplet,

       ’Billy Pitt took a cake and a raspberry jam,
        When he heard they had taken Seringapatam.’

At any rate, the rumour of his having done so, at periods of strong excitement, led to the inexplicable display of foresight on my father’s part.

My meditations upon Pitt were, under this influence, favourable to the post of a Prime Minister, but it was merely appetite that induced me to choose him; I never could imagine a grandeur in his office, notwithstanding my father’s eloquent talk of ruling a realm, shepherding a people, hurling British thunderbolts.  The day’s discipline was, that its selected hero should reign the undisputed monarch of it, so when I was for Pitt, I had my tart as he used to have it, and no story, for he had none, and I think my idea of the ruler of a realm presented him to me as a sort of shadow about a pastrycook’s shop.