As to his own personal enjoyment of literature, one form of it at least continued to attract him to the very last, and that was fiction. Relief from the strain of his scientific labors was best found in stories which distracted and absorbed: ‘He was extremely fond of novels,’ says his son, ‘and I remember well the way in which he would anticipate the pleasure of having a novel read to him, as he lay down, or lighted his cigarette. He took a vivid interest both in plot and characters, and would on no account know beforehand how a story finished; he considered looking at the end of a novel as a feminine vice.’[276] Darwin himself confirms this statement: ‘Novels, which are works of the imagination, though not of a very high order, have been for years a wonderful relief and pleasure to me, and I often bless all novelists. A surprising number have been read aloud to me, and I like all if moderately good, and if they do not end unhappily—against which a law ought to be passed.’[277] He enjoyed Miss Austen, he adored Scott, and cites the Laird of Redgauntlet’s facial peculiarity in the book on Expression. He did not like realism, even in the mild form practiced by George Eliot, and he wished things and people to be agreeable: ‘A novel, according to my taste, does not come into the first class, unless it contains some person whom one can thoroughly love, and if a pretty woman, all the better.’[197] But for the higher orders of literature, the loss was indubitable, and Darwin himself makes it very emphatic. He tells us that in his youth he enjoyed poetry. Shakespeare was his favorite reading. He read Thomson and Byron, and he got much pleasure from ‘Paradise Lost’: ‘Formerly Milton’s “Paradise Lost” had been my chief favorite, and in my excursions during the voyage of the _Beagle_, when I could take only a single volume, I always chose Milton.’[198] The solid evidence of this enjoyment is the frequent reference to poetical reading in Darwin’s books. Even in connection with strictly scientific topics he is apt to introduce some citation from the poets which not only proves his point, but shows his familiarity. Yet in later years all this poetical interest disappeared, and Darwin bewails the disappearance deeply. Shakespeare, who had touched and stirred him, ceases to awaken any emotion, rings merely hollow and empty: ‘Now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.’[199]