which, in my after days of familiar
acquaintance with it, always affected me like an evil potion taken into
my blood. The small, sweet draught which I sipped in that sleepy
school-salon atmosphere remained indelibly impressed upon my memory,
insomuch that when, during the last year of my stay in Paris, the news
of my uncle John's death at Lausanne, and that of Lord Byron at
Missolonghi, was communicated to me, my passionate regret was for the
great poet, of whose writings I knew but twenty lines, and not for my
own celebrated relation, of whom, indeed, I knew but little.

It was undoubtedly well that this dangerous source of excitement should
be sealed to me as long as possible; but I do not think that the works
of imagination to which I was allowed free access were of a specially
wholesome or even harmless tendency. The false morality and
attitudinizing sentiment of such books as "Les Contes a ma Fille," and
Madame de Genlis' "Veillees du Chateau," and "Adele et Theodore," were
rubbish, if not poison. The novels of Florian were genuine and simple
romances, less mischievous, I incline to think, upon the whole, than the
educational Countess's mock moral sentimentality; but Chateaubriand's
"Atala et Chactas," with its picturesque pathos, and his powerful
classical novel of "Les Martyrs," were certainly unfit reading for young
girls of excitable feelings and wild imaginations, in spite of the
religious element which I supposed was considered their recommendation.

One great intellectual good fortune befell me at this time, and that was
reading "Guy Mannering;" the first of Walter Scott's novels that I ever
read--the _dearest_, therefore. I use the word advisedly, for I know no
other than one of affection to apply to those enchanting and admirable
works, that deserve nothing less than love in return for the healthful
delight they have bestowed. To all who ever read them, the first must
surely be the best; the beginning of what a series of pure enjoyments,
what a prolonged, various, exquisite succession of intellectual
surprises and pleasures, amounting for the time almost to happiness.

Scott, like Shakespeare, has given us, for intimate acquaintance,
companions, and friends, men and women of such peculiar individual
nobleness, grace, wit, wisdom, and humor, that they people our minds and
recur to our thoughts with a vividness which makes them seem rather to
belong to the past realities of the memory, than to the shadowy v