“He prayeth best who loveth best
      All things, both great and small
    For the dear Lord who fashioned him
      He knows and loveth all.”

I fear I may misquote, for I have not “The Ancient Mariner” at my elbow, but even as it stands does it not elevate the horse-trough?  We all do this, I suppose, in a small way for ourselves.  There are few men who have not some chosen quotations printed on their study mantelpieces, or, better still, in their hearts.  Carlyle’s transcription of “Rest!  Rest!  Shall I not have all Eternity to rest in!” is a pretty good spur to a weary man.  But what we need is a more general application of the same thing for public and not for private use, until people understand that a graven thought is as beautiful an ornament as any graven image, striking through the eye right deep down into the soul.

However, all this has nothing to do with Macaulay’s glorious lays, save that when you want some flowers of manliness and patriotism you can pluck quite a bouquet out of those.  I had the good fortune to learn the Lay of Horatius off by heart when I was a child, and it stamped itself on my plastic mind, so that even now I can reel off almost the whole of it.  Goldsmith said that in conversation he was like the man who had a thousand pounds in the bank, but could not compete with the man who had an actual sixpence in his pocket.  So the ballad that you bear in your mind outweighs the whole bookshelf which waits for reference.  But I want you now to move your eye a little farther down the shelf to the line of olive-green volumes.  That is my edition of Scott.  But surely I must give you a little breathing space before I venture upon them.

II.

It is a great thing to start life with a small number of really good books which are your very own.  You may not appreciate them at first.  You may pine for your novel of crude and unadulterated adventure.  You may, and will, give it the preference when you can.  But the dull days come, and the rainy days come, and always you are driven to fill up the chinks of your reading with the worthy books which wait so patiently for your notice.  And then suddenly, on a day which marks an epoch in your life, you understand the difference.  You see, like a flash, how the one stands for nothing, and the other for literature.  From that day onwards you may return to your crudities, but at least you do so with some standard of comparison in your mind.  You can never be the same as you were before.  Then gradually the good thing becomes more dear to you; it builds itself up with your growing mind; it becomes a part of your better self, and so, at last, you can look, as I do now, at the old covers and love them for all that they have meant in the past.  Yes, it was the olive-green line of Scott’s novels which started me on to rhapsody.  They were the first books I ever owned—­long, long before I could appreciate or even understand them.