d as a
masterpiece of creative art. For Kipling his admiration was qualified;
but he loved "M'Andrews' Hymn," and often recited lines from the
"Recessional." Of the great novelists Dickens was easily his first
favourite; a long way behind came Scott, Stevenson and Jules Verne.
Dickens he knew and loved in every mood. Pickwick like Falstaff was to
him a source of perennial delight. He loved and honoured Dickens for
his rich and tender humanity, the passion of pity that suffused his
soul, the lively play of his comic fancy. Endowed with a keen sense of
humour, he read Mark Twain and W. W. Jacobs with gusto. As a
relaxation from historical studies he would sometimes devour a bluggy
story, and as he read would shout with laughter at its grotesque
out-topping of probabilities. He tried his own hand at sensational
yarns. I recall one of them, rich in gory incidents, with a villain
who is constantly leaping from a G.W.R. express to elude his pursuers.
Among his papers I found the manuscript of a detective story,
vivaciously written after the Sherlock Holmes and Watson manner.

At one time Paul liked to read Homer and Thucydides, Virgil and
Tacitus; but as soon as he was at home in the wide realm of English
literature he thrust the old classics from him, and subsequently his
hard historical reading gave him no opportunity, even if he had felt
the desire, to revert to Greek and Latin writers. But he was fully
conscious of the world's debt in culture to Greece and in law and
government to Rome. He wrote: "The influence of Greek thought, Greek
form, Greek art, is universal and eternal."

Of all names in literature he reverenced most that of Shakespeare, in
whom he saw "the spirit of the Renaissance personified," and whom he
described "as romantic, philosophic, realistic, and as varied and
impersonal as Nature." He was never weary of reading the tragedies and
historical plays. He resented any word in disparagement of
Shakespeare, and could not understand the inability of a supreme
artist like Tolstoy to appreciate his greatness. Though he has written
a noble sonnet in homage to Shakespeare's genius, Matthew Arnold once
permitted himself to say that "Homer leaves Shakespeare as far behind
as perfection leaves imperfection." Paul wrote in a marginal note,
"Bosh! to put it bluntly." He would say with Goethe, "The first page
of Shakespeare made me his for life, and when I had perused an entire
play I stood like one born blind, to who