of youth; and none, or almost
none, for the disenchantments of age. It is held to be a good taunt, and
somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when an old gentleman
waggles his head and says: 'Ah, so I thought when I was your age.' It
is not thought an answer at all, if the young man retorts: My venerable
sir, so I shall most probably think when I am yours.' And yet the one
is as good as the other: pass for pass, tit for tat, a Roland for an
Oliver.

*****

What shall we be when we grow really old? Of yore, a man was thought to
lay on restrictions and acquire new deadweight of mournful experience
with every year, till he looked back on his youth as the very summer of
impulse and freedom.

*****

And it may be worth while to add that these clouds rolled away in their
season, and that all clouds roll away at last, and the troubles of youth
in particular are things but of a moment.

*****

Through what little channels, by what hints and premonitions, the
consciousness of the man's art dawns first upon the child, it should be
not only interesting but instructive to inquire. A matter of curiosity
to-day, it will become the ground of science to-morrow. From the mind of
childhood there is more history and more philosophy to be fished up than
from all the printed volumes in a library.

*****

I could not finish THE PIRATE when I was a child, I have never finished
it yet; PEVERIL OF THE PEAK dropped half way through from my schoolboy
hands, and though I have since waded to an end in a kind of wager with
myself, the exercise was quite without enjoyment. There is something
disquieting in the considerations. I still think the visit to Ponto's
the best part of the BOOK OF SNOBS: does that mean that I was right when
I was a child, or does it mean that I have never grown since then, that
the child is not the man's father, but the man? and that I came into the
world with all my faculties complete, and have only learned sinsyne to
be more tolerant of boredom?

*****

The child thinks much in images, words are very live to him, phrases
that imply a picture eloquent beyond their value.

*****

Somehow my playmate had vanished, or is out of the story, as the sagas
say, but I was sent into the village on an errand; and, taking a book
of fairy tales, went down alone through a fir-wood, reading as I walked.
How often since then has it befallen me to be happy even so; but that
was the first time: the shock of that