Well, it is with feelings of great satisfaction that I date from that time the impartial appreciation for contemporary works which I possess--an appreciation borrowed far more from my feelings than from my judgment; an appreciation which neither political opinion nor literary hatred has ever been able to influence: my critical faculty, when considering the work of my _confrères,_ asks not whether it be the work of a friend or of an enemy, whether of one intimately known to me or of a stranger. However, I need hardly say that neither _Vêpres siciliennes_ nor _Louis IX._ belong to that order of literature which I was to be called upon later to feel and to understand, whose beauties I endeavoured to reproduce. I remained perfectly unmoved by these two tragedies, although I slightly preferred _Louis IX._ I have never read them again since, and probably I shall never re-read them; but I feel convinced that if I were to re-read them, my opinion upon them would be just the same to-day that' it was then. What a difference there was between the tame and monotonous feeling I then experienced and the glowing emotion _Hamlet_ roused in me, though it was the curtailed, bloodless, nerveless _Hamlet_ of Ducis! I had an innate instinct for truth and hatred of conventional standards; Terence's line has always seemed to me one of the finest lines ever written: "I am a man, and nothing that is human is alien unto me." And I was fast laying claim to my share in that line. I was growing more manly every day; my mother was the only person who continued to look upon me as though I were still a child. She was therefore greatly astonished when one evening I did not return at my usual time of coming home--and when at last I did come in, towards three in the morning, my heart leaping joyfully, I slipped into my room, which for the last three months I had obtained leave to have to myself, apart from my mother, foreseeing what was going to take place. I found my mother in tears, seated by my window, where she had been watching for my return, ready to give me the lecture such a late, or rather, early, return deserved!