Chap. V.] HIS FAVOURITE READING. 49 



works or books on travels, but novels he never could be induced 

 to read, and always declared, and indeed boasted, be had never 

 read a novel through in his life. If he saw anybody about him 

 with a novel, he would contrive to get hold of it, and would 

 then amuse himself by holding it up to ridicule by picking out 

 in an instant one of the weaker parts of it, and, reading aloud 

 the passage, would then, to the discomfort of the reader, laugh- 

 ingly inquire, " What pleasure could be derived by reading such 

 stuff?" He disliked books where truth and fiction were so inter- 

 woven that the one could not be distinguished from the other. 

 But books of fiction, such as fairy tales, and other works of 

 imagination or satire, he liked. And so those wonderful con- 

 ceptions from the vivid imagination of Shakspeare were to my 

 father the most delightful specimens of the kind. My father's 

 keen sense of imagination and of fun enabled him to enjoy 

 farces, comedies, and pantomimes, and I doubt whether any child 

 had more delight in the transformation scenes of a pantomime 

 than had my father. He therefore delighted in taking children 

 to see them. On a friend's not allowing his children to see a 

 pantomime until he considered them old enough to go behind 

 the scenes and see how delusive everything was, my father ex- 

 pressed his utter disapprobation of such a course, and remarked 

 that children should be brought up to know that no one is 

 exempt from being taken in by his senses. Those children, 

 my father asserted, who were brought up without imagination, 

 and who never saw tricks played before them without having 

 them all explained, were sure to be the ones who would be the 

 most likely to be deceived in after-life, and to become the victims 

 of designing men. 



