hard favour of the heroine strikes me, I had almost said with pain;
the villain's scowl no longer thrills me like a trumpet; and the

scenes themselves, those once unparalleled landscapes, seem the
efforts of a prentice hand. So much of fault we find; but on the

other side the impartialcritic rejoices to remark the presence of
a great unity of gusto; of those direct clap-trap appeals, which a

man is dead and buriable when he fails to answer; of the footlight
glamour, the ready-made, bare-faced, transpontine picturesque, a

thing not one with cold reality, but how much dearer to the mind!
The scenery of Skeltdom - or, shall we say, the kingdom of

Transpontus? - had a prevailingcharacter. Whether it set forth
Poland as in THE BLIND BOY, or Bohemia with THE MILLER AND HIS MEN,

or Italy with THE OLD OAK CHEST, still it was Transpontus. A
botanist could tell it by the plants. The hollyhock was all

pervasive, running wild in deserts; the dock was common, and the
bending reed; and overshadowing these were poplar, palm, potato

tree, and QUERCUS SKELTICA - brave growths. The caves were all
embowelled in the Surreyside formation; the soil was all betrodden

by the light pump of T. P. Cooke. Skelt, to be sure, had yet
another, an oriental string: he held the gorgeous east in fee; and

in the new quarter of Hyeres, say, in the garden of the Hotel des
Iles d'Or, you may behold these blessed visions realised. But on

these I will not dwell; they were an outwork; it was in the
accidental scenery that Skelt was all himself. It had a strong

flavour of England; it was a sort of indigestion of England and
drop-scenes, and I am bound to say was charming. How the roads

wander, how the castle sits upon the hill, how the sun eradiates
from behind the cloud, and how the congregated clouds themselves

up-roll, as stiff as bolsters! Here is the cottageinterior, the
usual first flat, with the cloak upon the nail, the rosaries of

onions, the gun and powder-horn and corner-cupboard; here is the
inn (this drama must be nautical, I foresee Captain Luff and Bold

Bob Bowsprit) with the red curtain, pipes, spittoons, and eight-day
clock; and there again is that impressivedungeon with the chains,

which was so dull to colour. England, the hedgerow elms, the thin
brick houses, windmills, glimpses of the navigable Thames -

England, when at last I came to visit it, was only Skelt made
evident: to cross the border was, for the Scotsman, to come home to

Skelt; there was the inn-sign and there the horse-trough, all
foreshadowed in the faithful Skelt. If, at the ripe age of

fourteen years, I bought a certain cudgel, got a friend to load it,
and thenceforward walked the tame ways of the earth my own ideal,

radiating pure romance - still I was but a puppet in the hand of
Skelt; the original of that regretted bludgeon, and surely the

antitype of all the bludgeon kind, greatly improved from
Cruikshank, had adorned the hand of Jonathan Wild, pl. I. "This is

mastering me," as Whitman cries, upon some lesser provocation.
What am I? what are life, art, letters, the world, but what my

Skelt has made them? He stamped himself upon my immaturity. The
world was plain before I knew him, a poor penny world; but soon it

was all coloured with romance. If I go to the theatre to see a
good old melodrama, 'tis but Skelt a little faded. If I visit a

bold scene in nature, Skelt would have been bolder; there had been
certainly a castle on that mountain, and the hollow tree - that set

piece - I seem to miss it in the foreground. Indeed, out of this
cut-and-dry, dull, swaggering, obtrusive, and infantile art, I seem

to have learned the very spirit of my life's enjoyment; met there
the shadows of the characters I was to read about and love in a

late future; got the romance of DER FREISCHUTZ long ere I was to
hear of Weber or the mighty Formes; acquired a gallery of scenes

and characters with which, in the silent theatre of the brain, I
might enact all novels and romances; and took from these rude cuts

an enduring and transforming pleasure. Reader - and yourself?
A word of moral: it appears that B. Pollock, late J. Redington, No.

73 Hoxton Street, not only publishes twenty-three of these old
stage favourites, but owns the necessary plates and displays a

modest readiness to issue other thirty-three. If you love art,
folly, or the bright eyes of children, speed to Pollock's, or to

Clarke's of Garrick Street. In Pollock's list of publicanda I
perceive a pair of my ancient aspirations: WRECK ASHORE and

SIXTEEN-STRING JACK; and I cherish the belief that when these shall
see once more the light of day, B. Pollock will remember this

apologist. But, indeed, I have a dream at times that is not all a
dream. I seem to myself to wander in a ghostly street - E. W., I

think, the postal district - close below the fool's-cap of St.
Paul's, and yet within easy hearing of the echo of the Abbey

bridge. There in a dim shop, low in the roof and smelling strong
of glue and footlights, I find myself in quaking treaty with great

Skelt himself, the aboriginal all dusty from the tomb. I buy, with
what a choking heart - I buy them all, all but the pantomimes; I

pay my mental money, and go forth; and lo! the packets are dust.
CHAPTER XIV. A GOSSIP ON A NOVEL OF DUMAS'S

THE books that we re-read the oftenest are not always those that we
admire the most; we choose and we re-visit them for many and

various reasons, as we choose and revisit human friends. One or
two of Scott's novels, Shakespeare, Moliere, Montaigne, THE EGOIST,

and the VICOMTE DE BRAGELONNE, form the inner circle of my
intimates. Behind these comes a good troop of dear acquaintances;

THE PILGRIM'S PROGRESS in the front rank, THE BIBLE IN SPAIN not
far behind. There are besides a certain number that look at me

with reproach as I pass them by on my shelves: books that I once
thumbed and studied: houses which were once like home to me, but

where I now rarely visit. I am on these sad terms (and blush to
confess it) with Wordsworth, Horace, Burns and Hazlitt. Last of

all, there is the class of book that has its hour of brilliancy -
glows, sings, charms, and then fades again into insignificance

until the fit return. Chief of those who thus smile and frown on
me by turns, I must name Virgil and Herrick, who, were they but

"Their sometime selves the same throughout the year,"
must have stood in the first company with the six names of my

continual literary intimates. To these six, incongruous as they
seem, I have long been faithful, and hope to be faithful to the day

of death. I have never read the whole of Montaigne, but I do not
like to be long without reading some of him, and my delight in what

I do read never lessens. Of Shakespeare I have read all but
RICHARD III, HENRY VI., TITUS ANDRONICAS, and ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS

WELL; and these, having already made all suitableendeavour, I now
know that I shall never read - to make up for which unfaithfulness

I could read much of the rest for ever. Of Moliere - surely the
next greatest name of Christendom - I could tell a very similar

story; but in a little corner of a little essay these princes are
too much out of place, and I prefer to pay my fealty and pass on.

How often I have read GUY MANNERING, ROB ROY, OR REDGAUNTLET, I
have no means of guessing, having begun young. But it is either

four or five times that I have read THE EGOIST, and either five or
six that I have read the VICOMTE DE BRAGELONNE.

Some, who would accept the others, may wonder that I should have
spent so much of this brief life of ours over a work so little

famous as the last. And, indeed, I am surprised myself; not at my
own devotion, but the coldness of the world. My acquaintance with

the VICOMTE began, somewhat indirectly, in the year of grace 1863,
when I had the advantage of studying certain illustrated dessert

plates in a hotel at Nice. The name of d'Artagnan in the legends I
already saluted like an old friend, for I had met it the year

before in a work of Miss Yonge's. My first perusal was in one of
those pirated editions that swarmed at that time out of Brussels,

and ran to such a troop of neat and dwarfish volumes. I understood
but little of the merits of the book; my strongest memory is of the

execution of d'Eymeric and Lyodot - a strange testimony to the
dulness of a boy, who could enjoy the rough-and-tumble in the Place

de Greve, and forget d'Artagnan's visits to the two financiers. My
next reading was in winter-time, when I lived alone upon the

Pentlands. I would return in the early night from one of my
patrols with the shepherd; a friendly face would meet me in the

door, a friendly retriever scurryupstairs to fetch my slippers;
and I would sit down with the VICOMTE for a long, silent, solitary