ugh, aloud,
hard names and all, from Genesis, to the Apocalypse, about once a
year: and to that discipline--patient, accurate, and resolute--I owe,
not only a knowledge of the book, which I find occasionally
serviceable, but much of my general power of taking pains, and the
best part of my taste in literature. From Walter Scott's novels I
might easily, as I grew older, have fallen to other people's novels;
and Pope might, perhaps, have led me to take Johnson's English, or
Gibbon's, as types of language; but once knowing the 32d of
Deuteronomy, or the 119th Psalm, the 15th of 1st Corinthians, the
Sermon on the Mount, and most of the Apocalypse, every syllable by
heart, and having always a way of thinking with; myself what words
meant, it was not possible for me, even in the foolishest times of
youth, to write entirely superficial or formal English, and the
affectation of trying to write like Hooker or George Herbert was the
most innocent I could have fallen into."

* * * * *

"As years went on, and I came to be four or five years old he (the
father) could command a post-chaise and pair for two months in the
summer, by help of which, with my mother and me, he went the round of
his country customers (who liked to see the principal of the house,
his own traveler); so that, at a jog-trot pace, and through the
panoramic opening of the four windows of a post-chaise, made more
panoramic still to me because my seat was a little bracket in front
(for we used to hire the chaise regularly for the two months out of
Long Acre, and so could have it bracketed and pocketed as we liked), I
saw all the highroads, and most of the cross ones, of England and
Wales, and great part of lowland Scotland, as far as Perth, where
every other year we spent the whole summer; and I used to read the
_Abbot_ at Kinross, and the _Monastery_ at Glen Farg, which I used to
confuse with 'Glendearg,' and thought that the White Lady had as
certainly lived by the streamlet in the glen of the Ochlis, as the
Queen of Scots in the island of Loch Leven.

"To my farther benefit, as I grew older, I thus saw nearly all the
noblemen's houses in England, in reverent and healthy delight of
uncovetous admiration,--perceiving, as soon as I could perceive any
political truth at all, that it was probably much happier to live in a
small house, and have Warwick castle to be astonished at, than to live
in Warwick castle and have nothing to be