hing; but he could not learn superficially. A
similar remark would have applied to the attainments of people who were
old when I was young. They might know much, or they might know nothing;
but they did not know superficially. What they professed to know, that
you could be sure they knew. The affectation of culture was despised;
and ignorance, where it existed, was avowed. For example, everyone knew
Italian, but no one pretended to know German. I remember men who had
never been at a University, but had passed straight from a Public School
to a Cavalry Regiment or the House of Commons, and who yet could quote
Horace as easily as the present generation quotes Kipling. These people
inherited the traditions of Mrs. Montagu, who "vindicated the genius of
Shakespeare against the calumnies of Voltaire," and they knew the
greatest poet of all time with an absolute ease and familiarity. They
did not trouble themselves about various readings, and corrupt texts,
and difficult passages. They had nothing in common with that true father
of all Shakespearean criticism, Mr. Curdle, in _Nicholas Nickleby_, who
had written a treatise on the question whether Juliet's nurse's husband
was really "a merry man," or whether it was only his widow's
affectionate partiality that induced her so to report him. But they knew
the whole mass of the Plays with a natural and unforced intimacy; their
speech was saturated with the immortal diction, and Hamlet's
speculations were their nearest approach to metaphysics. Pope was quoted
whenever the occasion suggested him, and Johnson was esteemed the Prince
of Critics. Broadly speaking, all educated people knew the English poets
down to the end of the eighteenth century. Byron and Moore were enjoyed
with a sort of furtive and fearful pleasure; Wordsworth was tolerated,
and Tennyson was "coming in." Everyone knew Scott's novels by heart, and
had his or her favourite heroine and hero.

I said in a former chapter that I had from my earliest days free access
to an excellent library; and, even before I could read comfortably by
myself, my interest in books was stimulated by listening to my elders as
they read aloud. The magic of words and cadence--the purely sensuous
pleasure of melodious sound--stirred me from the time when I was quite a
child. Poetry, of course, came first; but prose was not much later. I
had by nature a good memory, and it retained, by no effort on my part,
my favourite bits of Macaulay and Sco