IV. FONTAINEBLEAU 303

proving to me that in those directions of imagination I was even a worse blockhead than Agassiz himself. Meantime, the autumn weather was fine, the corn was ripe, and once out of sight of the paddock, the pump room, and the Parade, the space of surrounding Warwickshire within afternoon walk was extremely impressive to me, in its English way. Warwick towers in sight over the near tree tops; Kenilworth, within an afternoon’s walk; Stratford, to be reached by an hour’s drive with a trotting pony; and, round them, as far as eye could reach, a space of perfect England, not hill and dale,-that might be anywhere,-but hill and flat, through which the streams linger, and where the canals wind without lock.

64. Under these peaceful conditions I began to look carefully at cornflowers, thistles, and hollyhocks; and find, by entry on Sept. 15th, that I was writing a bit of the King of the Golden River, and reading Alison’s Europe and Turner’s Chemistry.

Anent the King of the River,¹ I remorsefully be think me no word has been said of the dawn and sunrise of Dickens on us; from the first syllable of him in the Sketches, altogether precious and admirable to my father and me; and the new number of Pickwick and following Nickleby looked to, through whatever laborious or tragic realities might be upon us, as unmixed bliss, for the next day. But Dickens taught us nothing with which we were not familiar,-only painted it perfectly for us. We knew quite as much about coachmen and hostlers as he did; and rather more about Yorkshire. As a caricaturist, both in the studied development of his own manner, and that of the illustrative etchings, he put himself out of the pale of great authors; so that he never became an educational element of my life, but only one of its chief comforts and restoratives.

The King of the Golden River was written to amuse

¹ [See Vol. I. pp. 305-354.]

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