Cellini, too, draws me as regularly and irresistibly as the moon makes our tides. Here is richness. The breathless impetuosity of the whole narrative, the inconceivable truculence of the man, fascinates me, who am so different. When I looked at that "Perseus" in Florence, when I leaned over the medal-cases in South Kensington and stared hard at the work of his murderous hands, I felt awed and baffled. How could he do it--he with his dagger just withdrawn from some rival's shoulders, his fingers just unclasped from some enemy's windpipe? Then, again, the virile cheerfulness of the man! God is ever on his side, Justice is his guardian angel. And while musing upon him some few days back, I fell to wondering if I might not imitate him. I mean, why could not I take the life of some such man (and I know one at least who could sit for the portrait), and write a fictitious autobiography in that truculent, bombastic, interesting style? I have the material, and I believe I could do it. What do you think, old friend? It is already one of my plans for the future, when I am done wandering. That last word reminds me of my Borrow. Who can describe the bewildering delight when one first plunges into "Lavengro" and the "Romany Rye"? To take them from the book-case and carry them out to Barnet, where the Kingmaker fell, and read with the wind in your face and the Great North Road before your eyes--is that too much to ask of mine ancient Londoner? Believe me, the thing is worth doing. No man ever put so divine an optimism into his books, so genuine a love of "nature." Says Mr. Petulengro: "There's night and day, brother, both sweet things; sun, moon, and stars, brother, all sweet things; there's likewise the wind on the heath. Life is very sweet, brother; who would wish to die?" One of the most precious memories of my younger manhood is brought back to me as I write those words. It was a Sunday afternoon in late autumn, in one of those unfrequented ways which slant off from the Great North Road beyond Hadley Heath, where the green turf bordered the brown road and the leaves covered the earth beneath the trees with a carpet of flaming cloth-of-gold. I had left my book and bicycle to one side, and, seated upon a low grey stone wall, I watched the sun go down. Behind me, across the intervening meadows, rose clouds of dust, redolent of waste gases, where thundered an ever-increasing traffic of swift vehicles. In front a vaporous mist was rising from the land; the shadows broadened, and the red western glow grew deeper, while in the middle distance a tiny child, clad in green cloak and little red hood, stood conning her Sunday story--a jewel of quiet colour in the gathering autumn twilight. And so, as I listened to the roar from the macadamed highway and looked out upon that evening glory, it was as though I heard, far off, the throbbing pulse of the great world's mighty hand, while I sat still in the heart of it.