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 &quot;Frederick the 

 Great&quot; - 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 &quot;Guerre de 

 Sept Ans&quot;; then I read all I could about Gus- 

 tavus Adolphus; and, gradually dropping every 

 thing but the military side, I got hold of quaint 



