ass that runs out into the sea or the mud according
to the state of the tide. It is the place where dead horses are buried.
Sitting there, my father read me "The Lays of Ancient Rome." It was the
first poetry that had moved me after the stable-boy's "Orange Rhymes."
Later on he read me "Ivanhoe" and "The Lay of the Last Minstrel," and they
are still vivid in the memory. I re-read "Ivanhoe" the other day, but it
has all vanished except Gurth, the swineherd, at the outset and Friar Tuck
and his venison pasty, the two scenes that laid hold of me in childhood.
"The Lay of the Last Minstrel" gave me a wish to turn magician that
competed for years with the dream of being killed upon the sea-shore. When
I first went to school, he tried to keep me from reading boys' papers,
because a paper, by its very nature, as he explained to me, had to be made
for the average boy or man and so could not but thwart one's growth. He
took away my paper and I had not courage to say that I was but reading and
delighting in a prose re-telling of the Iliad. But after a few months, my
father said he had been too anxious and became less urgent about my
lessons and less violent if I had learnt them badly, and he ceased to
notice what I read. From that on I shared the excitement which ran through
all my fellows on Wednesday afternoons when the boys' papers were
published, and I read endless stories I have forgotten as completely as
Grimm's Fairy Tales that I read at Sligo, and all of Hans Andersen except
the Ugly Duckling which my mother had read to me and to my sisters. I
remember vaguely that I liked Hans Andersen better than Grimm because he
was less homely, but even he never gave me the knights and dragons and
beautiful ladies that I longed for. I have remembered nothing that I read,
but only those things that I heard or saw. When I was ten or twelve my
father took me to see Irving play Hamlet, and did not understand why I
preferred Irving to Ellen Terry, who was, I can now see, the idol of
himself and his friends. I could not think of her, as I could of Irving's
Hamlet, as but myself, and I was not old enough to care for feminine charm
and beauty. For many years Hamlet was an image of heroic self-possession
for the poses of youth and childhood to copy, a combatant of the battle
within myself. My father had read me the story of the little boy murdered
by the Jews in Chaucer and the tale of Sir Topaz, explaining the hard
words, and though both excited