Page:Books and men.djvu/83

 Rh Burns to fiction. Macaulay surely learned from his beloved Æneid the art of presenting a dubious statement with all the vigorous coloring of truth. Wordsworth congratulated himself and Coleridge that, as children, they had ranged at will

Coleridge, in his turn, was wont to express his sense of superiority over those who had not read fairy tales when they were young, and Charles Lamb, who was plainly of the same way of thinking, wrote to him hotly on the subject of the "cursed Barbauld crew," and demanded how he would ever have become a poet, if, instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in his infancy, he had been crammed with geography, natural history, and other useful information. What a picture we have of Cardinal Newman's sensitive and flexible mind in these few words which bear witness to his childish musings! "I used to wish," he says in the third chapter of the Apologia, "that the Arabian Nights were true; my imagination ran on unknown