tellectual elements of the art, the choice of the essential
note and the right word: things that to a happier constitution had
perhaps come by nature. And regarded as training, it had one grave
defect; for it set me no standard of achievement. So that there was
perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more effort, in my secret
labours at home. Whenever I read a book or a passage that particularly
pleased me, in which a thing was said or an effect rendered with
propriety, in which there was either some conspicuous force or some
happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at once and set myself
to ape that quality. I was unsuccessful, and I knew it; and tried
again, and was again unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at
least in these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in harmony,
in construction and the co-ordination of parts. I have thus played the
sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne,
to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to
Obermann.[3] I remember one of these monkey tricks, which was called
_The Vanity of Morals_: it was to have had a second part, _The Vanity
of Knowledge_; and as I had neither morality nor scholarship, the
names were apt; but the second part was never attempted, and the first
part was written (which is my reason for recalling it, ghostlike, from
its ashes) no less than three times: first in the manner of Hazlitt,
second in the manner of Ruskin,[4] who had cast on me a passing spell,
and third, in a laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne. So with my
other works: _Cain_, an epic, was (save the mark!) an imitation of
_Sordello: Robin Hood_, a tale in verse, took an eclectic middle
course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer and Morris: in _Monmouth,_ a
tragedy, I reclined on the bosom of Mr. Swinburne; in my innumerable
gouty-footed lyrics, I followed many masters; in the first draft of
_The King's Pardon_, a tragedy, I was on the trail of no lesser man
than John Webster; in the second draft of the same piece, with
staggering versatility, I had shifted my allegiance to Congreve, and
of course conceived my fable in a less serious vein--for it was not
Congreve's verse, it was his exquisite prose, that I admired and
sought to copy. Even at the age of thirteen I had tried to do justice
to the inhabitants of the famous city of Peebles[5] in the style of
the _Book of Snobs_. So I might go on for ever, through all my
abortive novels, and dow