26 THE LIFE OF PHILIP HENRY GOSSE. 



There was in the office bookcase a copy of Scarron's 

 Roman Comique in English, and the broad humour of this 

 farcical classic delighted the boy amazingly, although its 

 coarseness a little shocked him. He enjoyed it infinitely 

 more than Don Quixote, which he had read a short time 

 before. " Perhaps my boyish mind," he says, " could not 

 appreciate the polished wit and satire of Cervantes so well 

 as the broad grins and buffoonery of Scarron." But Don 

 Quixote was a book to which he retained through life an 

 inexplicable aversion. Another novel in the office book- 

 case was the immortal Joseph Andrews, with which he was 

 so greatly charmed that, on a second perusal, he could not 

 refrain from taking it home to read aloud in the evenings 

 for the delectation of his mother and his sister. The 

 rough expressions which he had not observed as he read 

 the book to himself, however, became painfully patent 

 when propounded openly by the fireside, and he found, 

 what others have discovered before and since, that Joseph 

 Andrews, noble as it is, is one of the male children of the 

 Muses ; he had to make an excuse and leave the tale half 

 told. Among other literary stores laid up in this delight- 

 ful bookcase were the " Peter Porcupine " pamphlets of 

 William Cobbett, and these, when everything else was 

 exhausted, were waded through for lack of better reading 

 in many unoccupied hours. ■ 



John Brown remained at school in Blandford until mid- 

 summer, 1825, when the friends were once more reunited 

 in Poole. He was presently put into a counting-house on 

 the Quay, and after office-hours, which closed at five in 

 each case, the two lads were always together. They read 

 and studied science together, tried their hands at music, 

 and stained their clothes with chemicals, on one occasion 

 coming near to a public scandal with the unparalleled 

 success of an artificial volcano. A large room at the top 



