14 PRÆTERITA-I

own election, and my mother forced me, by steady daily toil, to learn long chapters of the Bible by heart; as well as to read it every syllable through, aloud, hard names and all, from Genesis to the Apocalypse, about once a year: and to that discipline-patient, accurate, and resolute-I owe, not only a knowledge of the book, which I find occasionally serviceable, but much of my general power of taking pains, and the best part of my taste in literature. From Walter Scott’s novels I might easily, as I grew older, have fallen to other people’s novels; and Pope might, perhaps, have led me to take Johnson’s English, or Gibbon’s, as types of language; but, once knowing the 32nd of Deuteronomy, the 119th Psalm, the 15th of 1st Corinthians, the Sermon on the Mount, and most of the Apocalypse, every syllable by heart, and having always a way of thinking with myself what words meant, it was not possible for me, even in the foolishest times of youth, to write entirely superficial or formal English;¹ and the affectation of trying to write like Hooker² and George Herbert was the most innocent I could have fallen into.

3. From my own chosen masters, then, Scott and Homer, I learned the Toryism which my best after-thought has only served to confirm.

That is to say, a most sincere love of kings,³ and dislike of everybody who attempted to disobey them. Only, both by Homer and Scott, I was taught strange ideas about kings, which I find for the present much obsolete; for, I perceived that both the author of the Iliad and the author of Waverley made their kings, or king-loving persons, do harder work than anybody else. Tydides or Idomeneus always killed twenty Trojans to other people’s one, and Redgauntlet speared more salmon than any of the Solway fishermen;⁴ and-which was particularly a subject of admiration

¹ [Compare Vol. XXIV. p. 449.]

² [Compare Vol. IV. pp. 334, and Vol. XVIII. p. 32.]

³ [Compare below, § 7.]

⁴ [See, for Diomed (son of Tydeus), such passages in Pope’s Iliad as x. 560; and for Idomeneus, xiii. 457 seq.; and for Redgauntlet, Letter 4 of Scott’s novel.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]