Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/276

238 238 CHAMBERS, KNIGHT, AND CASSELL. that I took to Latin and to books both keenly and exclusively, while you broke down in your classical course, and had fully as great a passion for rough sport and enterprise as for reading, that being again a passion of which I never had one particle. This has, however, resulted in making you, what I never was inclined to be, a close observer of external nature an immense advantage in your case. Still I think I could present against your hardy field observations by frith and fell, and cave and cliff, some striking analogies in the finding out and devouring of books, making my way, for instance, through a whole chestful of the " Encyclopaedia Britannica," which I found in a lumber garret. I must also say that an unfortunate tenderness of feet, scarcely yet got over, had much to do in making me mainly a fireside student. As to domestic connections and conditions, mine being of the middle classes were superior to yours for the first twelve years. After that, my father being unfortu- nate in business, we were reduced to poverty, and came down to even humbler things than you ex- perienced. I passed through some years of the direst hardship, not the least evil being a state of feeling quite unnatural in youth, a stern and burning defiance of a social world in which we were harshly and coldly treated by former friends, differing only in external respects from ourselves. In your life there is one crisis where I think your experiences must have been somewhat like mine ; it is the brief period at Inver- ness. Some of your expressions there bring all my own early feelings again to life. A disparity between the internal consciousness of powers and accomplish- ments and the external ostensible aspect led in me to the very same wrong methods of setting myself