n
guiding me to certain prohibited works, before unknown to me). But as he
was a man of poetic genial feeling, he found himself irresistibly
fascinated by what he had hunted down, and so read Plato, and when he
died actually left behind him a manuscript translation of Spinoza's
works!

The reader may imagine what a marvellous _find_ I was to him. George
Boker, who was ages beyond me in knowledge of the world--man and
woman--said one day that he could imagine how Dodd sat and chuckled to
hear me talk, which remark I did not at all understand and thought rather
stupid. I remember that during my first call on him we discussed _Sartor
Resartus_, and I expressed it as my firm conviction that the idea of the
Clothes Philosophy had been taken from the Treatise on Fire and Salt by
the Rosicrucian Lord Blaise. Then, in all _naivete_ and innocence of
effect, I discussed some point in Kant's "Critic," and a few other
trifles not usually familiar to sub-Freshmen, and took my departure, very
much pleased at having entered on a life where my favourite reading did
not really seem to be quite silly or disreputable. I remember, however,
being very much surprised indeed at finding that the other students, in
whom I expected to encounter miracles of learning, or youth far superior
to myself in erudition and critical knowledge, did not quite come up to
my anticipations. However, as they were all far beyond me in
mathematics, I supposed their genius had all gone in that direction, for
well I knew that the toughest page in Fichte was a mere trifle compared
to the awful terrors of the Rule of Three, and so treated them as young
men who were my superiors in other and greater things.

There were wearisome morning prayers in the chapel, and roll-call every
morning, and then an hour of recitation before breakfast, study till ten
or eleven, study and recitation in the afternoon, and evening prayers
again and study in the evening. The Sabbath was anything but a day of
rest, for we had the same prayers; morning attendance at church;
afternoon, the learning and reciting of _four chapters_ in the Bible;
while we were expected in the evening to master one or two chapters in
the Greek Testament. I am not sorry that I used to read books during
sermon-time. It kept me from, or from me, a great deal of wickedness.
_Videlicet_:

The sermons consisted principally of assertion that man himself consisted
chiefly of original sin. As evil communicat