You who have sat with me before upon the green settee are familiar with the upper shelf, with the tattered Macaulay, the dapper Gibbon, the drab Boswell, the olive-green Scott, the pied Borrow, and all the goodly company who rub shoulders yonder.  By the way, how one wishes that one’s dear friends would only be friends also with each other.  Why should Borrow snarl so churlishly at Scott?  One would have thought that noble spirit and romantic fancy would have charmed the huge vagrant, and yet there is no word too bitter for the younger man to use towards the elder.  The fact is that Borrow had one dangerous virus in him—­a poison which distorts the whole vision—­for he was a bigoted sectarian in religion, seeing no virtue outside his own interpretation of the great riddle.  Downright heathendom, the blood-stained Berserk or the chaunting Druid, appealed to his mind through his imagination, but the man of his own creed and time who differed from him in minutiae of ritual, or in the interpretation of mystic passages, was at once evil to the bone, and he had no charity of any sort for such a person.  Scott therefore, with his reverent regard for old usages, became at once hateful in his eyes.  In any case he was a disappointed man, the big Borrow, and I cannot remember that he ever had much to say that was good of any brother author.  Only in the bards of Wales and in the Scalds of the Sagas did he seem to find his kindred spirits, though it has been suggested that his complex nature took this means of informing the world that he could read both Cymric and Norse.  But we must not be unkind behind the magic door—­and yet to be charitable to the uncharitable is surely the crown of virtue.

So much for the top line, concerning which I have already gossipped for six sittings, but there is no surcease for you, reader, for as you see there is a second line, and yet a third, all equally dear to my heart, and all appealing in the same degree to my emotions and to my memory.  Be as patient as you may, while I talk of these old friends, and tell you why I love them, and all that they have meant to me in the past.  If you picked any book from that line you would be picking a little fibre also from my mind, very small, no doubt, and yet an intimate and essential part of what is now myself.  Hereditary impulses, personal experiences, books—­those are the three forces which go to the making of man.  These are the books.

This second line consists, as you see, of novelists of the eighteenth century, or those of them whom I regard as essential.  After all, putting aside single books, such as Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy,” Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield,” and Miss Burney’s “Evelina,” there are only three authors who count, and they in turn wrote only three books each, of first-rate importance, so that by the mastery of nine books one might claim to have a fairly broad view of this most important and distinctive branch of English literature.  The three men are, of course, Fielding, Richardson,