But I was to a great extent self-taught. We had an excellent, though old-fashioned, library, and I spent a great deal of my time in miscellaneous reading. The Waverley Novels gave me my first taste of literary enjoyment, and _Pickwick_ (in the original green covers) came soon after. Shakespeare and _Don Quixote_ were imposed by paternal authority. Jeremy Taylor, Fielding, Smollett, Swift, Dryden, Pope, Byron, Moore, Macaulay, Miss Edgeworth, Bulwer-Lytton, were among my earliest friends, and I had an insatiable thirst for dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Tennyson was the first poet whom I really loved, but I also was fond of Scott's poetry, the _Lays of Ancient Rome_, the _Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers_, and _The Golden Treasury_. Milton, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Matthew Arnold came later, but while I was still a boy. George Eliot, Thackeray, Ruskin, and Trollope came when I was at Oxford; and I am not sure that Browning ever came. On the whole, I owe my chief enjoyment to Scott, Dickens, Wordsworth, and Tennyson, and to _Pickwick_ more than to any single book. But I think the keenest thrill of intellectual pleasure which I ever felt passed through me when, as a boy at Harrow, I first read Wordsworth's "Daffodils." Our home, in its outward aspects, was extremely bright and cheerful. We had, as a family, a keen sense of fun, much contempt for convention, and great fluency of speech; and our material surroundings were such as to make life enjoyable. Even as a child, I used to say to myself, when cantering among Scotch firs and rhododendrons, "The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places." A graver element was supplied by a good deal of ill-health, by bereavements, and, in some sense, by our way of religion. My home was intensely Evangelical, and I lived from my earliest days in an atmosphere where the salvation of the individual soul was the supreme and constant concern of life. No form of worldliness entered into it, but it was full of good works, of social service, and of practical labour for the poor. All life was lived, down to its minutest detail, "as ever in the great task-Master's eye." From our very earliest years we were taught the Bible, at first orally; and later on were encouraged to read it, by gifts of handsomely bound copies. I remember that our aids to study were Adam Clarke's Commentary, Nicholl's _Help to Reading the Bible_, and a book called _Light in the Dwelling_. Hymns played a great part in our training. As soon as we could speak, we learned "When rising from the bed of death," and "Beautiful Zion, built above." "Rock of Ages" and "Jesu, Lover of my soul" were soon added. The Church Catechism we were never taught. I was confirmed without learning it. It was said to be too difficult; it really was too sacramental. By way of an easier exercise, I was constrained to learn "The Shorter Catechism of the General Assembly of Divines at Westminster." We had Family Prayers twice every day. My