"I can't say what Colonel Milman might like to
read."

The interview ended and my books came. What a joy they were! I read
Gibbon and Mosheim right through again, with Carlyle's "Frederick,"
"French Revolution" and "Cromwell," Forster's "Statesmen of the
Commonwealth," and a mass of literature on the Rebellion and the
Protectorate. I dug deep into the literature of Evolution. I read over
again all Shakespeare, Shelley, Spenser, Swift and Byron, besides a
number of more modern writers. French books were not debarred, so I
read Diderot, Voltaire, Paul Louis Courier, and the whole of Flaubert,
including "L'Education Sentimentale," which I never attacked before, but
which I found, after conquering the apparent dullness of the first half
of the first volume, to be one of the greatest of his triumphs. Mr.
Gerald Massey, then on a visit to England, was churlishly refused a
visiting order from the Home Office, but he sent me his two magnificent
volumes on "Natural Genesis," and a note to the interim editor of the
_Freethinker_, requesting him to tell me that I had his sympathy. "I
fight the same battle as himself," said Mr. Massey, "although with a
somewhat different weapon." I was also favored with a presentation copy
of verses by the one writer I most admire, whose genius I reverenced
long before the public and its critics discovered it. It would gratify
my vanity rather than my prudence to reveal his name.

Agreeably to the proverb that if you give some men an inch they will
take an ell, I induced the Governor to let me pursue my study of
Italian. First he allowed me a Grammar, then a Conversation Book, then
a Dictionary, then a Prose Reading Book, and then a Poetical Anthology.
These volumes, being an addition to the two ordinary ones, gave my
little domicile a civilised appearance. Cleaners sometimes, when my
door was opened, looked in from the corridor with an expression of awe.
"Why," I heard one say, "he's got a cell like a bookshop."

With my books, my Italian, and my Colenso, I managed to kill the
time; and although the snake-like days were still long, they were less
venomous. Yet the remainder of my sentence was a terrible ordeal. I
never lost heart, but I lost strength. My brain was miraculously clear,
but it grew weaker as the body languished; and before my release I could
hardly read more than an hour or two a day.

The only break in the monotony of my life was when I received a visit.
Mrs. Besant, Dr. Aveling