266 A BOOK-LOVER'S HOLIDAYS 



really good, some really enthralling book — 

 Tacitus, Thucydides, Herodotus, Polybius, or 

 Goethe, Keats, Gray, or Lowell — and lose all 

 memory of everything grimy, and of the base- 

 ness that must be parried or conquered. 



Like every one else, I am apt to read in 

 streaks. If I get interested in any subject I 

 read different books connected with it, and 

 probably also read books on subjects suggested 

 by it. Having read Carlyle-s "Frederick the 

 Great" — with its splendid description of the bat- 

 tles, and of the unyielding courage and thrifty 

 resourcefulness of the iron-tempered King; and 

 with its screaming deification of able brutality 

 in the name of morality, and its practise of the 

 suppression and falsification of the truth under 

 the pretense of preaching veracity — I turned 

 to Macaulay's essay on this subject, and found 

 that the historian whom it has been the fashion 

 of the intellectuals to patronize or deride 

 showed a much sounder philosophy and an in- 

 finitely greater appreciation of and devotion 

 to truth than was shown by the loquacious 

 apostle of the doctrine of reticence. 



Then I took up Waddington's ''Guerre de 

 Sept Ans"; then I read all I could about Gus- 

 tavus Adolphus; and, gradually dropping every- 

 thing but the military side, I got hold of quaint 



