'394 The Perplexities of a Book-Wwm. 



myself the command of his valiant troops. Often and often have I 

 pictured to myself at the farther end of my study, before an old curtain 

 of damask, the kneeling queen and the Jesuitical Wolsey I have often 

 gasped over a catastrophe, watched it with intense pain to the close, and 

 worked myself into a fever in my zeal to rectify the author, or, as it 

 might be, rescue the innocent of his play. But who looked on at my 

 folly ? None none. I was utterly deserted by men ; they knew me 

 not, and I did not choose to know them. 



Once, in deference to the popular talk, if I may so term it, of books, I 

 read Rabelais. His wit was obscure or local he did not suit my feelings ; 

 there was a labour or a solemnity in his manner that I could not relish, 

 and I cast away his book mortified and disappointed. Months passed, 

 and I again met a passage in a favourite work, which seduced me into 

 another perusal. Again I read him, and was again disappointed. Pan- 

 tagruel was a monster whom I could neither understand nor enjoy ; the 

 lean and lascivious Panurge fatigued and disgusted me, and the Holy 

 Bottle sickened me with its punning and its grossness. It is true, I read 

 the Frenchman's writings with patience indeed with industry ; but that 

 was because they had been panegyrized on all hands, and I did not like 

 to omit forming an opinion for myself agreeably to my own rules ; yet I 

 confess that his constant reiterations, amplifications, and stilted drollery 

 puzzled me on my own ground ; I was furnished with no standard by 

 which I could try him he evaded me at every turn ; so I heartily dis- 

 liked him, without being able to tell why. In short, Rabelais was the 

 only author that I ever quarrelled with without assigning a defined, how- 

 ever insufficient cause. 



But the infirmity of my temper, exaggerated by severities, was not at 

 a loss to find pretexts for ill humour with other authors. I threw Shen- 

 stone into the fire because he described a mode of life which I know, and 

 he knew, to be unreal ; and I wished in my heart that I could recal the 

 man from his grave, and place himself beside a flock of sheep on a moun- 

 tain's side in a shower of rain. I detested Shenstone from first to last, 

 because the delusion he attempted to practice on me was raised upon a 

 presumption that I was a stranger to the abstract delights of nature, 

 which he tortured into whatever fantastic forms he pleased. I could 

 submit to a species of delusion that blinds out care, and throws a veil 

 over misfortunes which, if we choose, we may diminish, or forget, or put 

 in masquerade ; but I could not submit to be mocked in the bosom of 

 the green fields, where the sparkling waters, and the uninitiated dyes of 

 the flowers, are beaming a contradiction in my face. I quarrelled, too, 

 with the whole French drama, that permits false sentiment to usurp the 

 place of real feeling, and substitutes measured rhymes for the language 

 of passion. Corneille, on this account, was my abhorrence, and even 

 Voltaire stood neglected on my shelves. The Germans, even the best of 

 them, were amongst my rejected books ; and from Goethe to Frederic 

 Laun, I read to satiety delighted at the outset with the romance of 

 affected feeling, but disgusted at last with its detailed development and 

 sickly impertinence. Yet there was one of the Germans who made a 

 first impression on my mind I could never subsequently obliterate that 

 was Schiller. I acknowledged he was guilty of all the faults of his 

 school ; that he had been trained up, as it were, in mawkish ribaldry 

 and girlish weakness, that his writings creamed over with the very 

 effervescence of bad taste ; but I could not choose but think that all 

 these points, which in others projected prominently and offensively in 



