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PRÆTERITA-I
CHAPTER I
THE SPRINGS OF WANDEL
(The reader must be advised that the first two chapters are reprinted, with slight revision, from “Fors Clavigera,” having been written there chiefly for the political lessons, which appear now introduced somewhat violently.1)
I AM, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school;-Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, and Homer’s. I name these two out of the numberless great Tory writers, because they were my own two masters. I had Walter Scott’s novels, and the Iliad (Pope’s translation), for constant reading when I was a child, on week-days: on Sunday, their effect was tempered by Robinson Crusoe and the Pilgrim’s Progress; my mother having it deeply in her heart to make an evangelical clergyman of me. Fortunately, I had an aunt more evangelical than my mother; and my aunt gave me cold mutton for Sunday’s dinner, which-as I much preferred it hot-greatly diminished the influence of the Pilgrim’s Progress; and the end of the matter was, that I got all the noble imaginative teaching of Defoe and Bunyan, and yet-am not an evangelical clergyman.
2. I had, however, still better teaching than theirs, and that compulsorily, and every day of the week.
Walter Scott and Pope’s Homer were reading of my
1 [This chapter is a collection of slightly revised passages from Fors Clavigera, Letters 10 (1871), 46 (1874), 51, 52, 56 (1875), and 28 (1873). For particulars, and note of the revision, see the Bibliographical Note; above, p. xci.]
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[Version 0.04: March 2008]
