At Lassagne's persuasion I branched out in other directions, and began a course of reading. Walter Scott came first. The first novel I read by the "Scottish Bard," as he was then called, was _Ivanhoe_. Accustomed to the mild plots of Madame Cottin, or to the eccentric pranks of the author of the _Barons de Felsheim_ and of the _Enfant du Carnaval_, it took me some time to get used to the rude, uncouth ways of Gurth the swineherd, and to the facetious jokes of Wamba, Cedric's jester. But when the author introduced me to the old Saxon's romantic dining-hall; when I had seen the fire on the hearth, fed by a whole oak tree, with its light sparkling on the monk and on the dress of the unknown pilgrim; when I saw all the members of the family of the thane take their places at the long oak board, from the head of the castle, the king of his territory, to the meanest servitor; when I saw the Jew Isaac in his yellow cap, and his daughter Rebecca in her gold corselet; when the tourney at Ashby had given me a foretaste of the powerful sword-shakes and lance-thrusts that I should again come across in Froissart, oh! then, little by little, the clouds that had veiled my sight began to lift, I saw open out before me more extended horizons than any that had appeared to me when Adolphe de Leuven worked these changes in my provincial imagination that I have already mentioned. Next followed Cooper, with his big forests, his vast prairies, his boundless oceans, his _Pioneers_, his _Prairie_, his _Redskins_--three masterpieces of description, wherein absence of substance is well concealed beneath wealth of style, so that one goes the whole way through a novel of his, like the apostle, upon ground ever ready to yawn open and swallow one up, and yet, nevertheless, one is upheld, not by faith but by style, from the first page to the last. Then came Byron--Byron, lyric and dramatic poet, who died at Missolonghi just when I was beginning to study him in Paris. There had been a tremendous rage over Lord Byron for some time; the glory of the poet had derived fresh glamour from the Greek camp bivouacs; his name would henceforth be associated with those of the famous Greeks of old; not only would Byron be spoken of as akin to Sir Walter Scott and Chateaubriand, but in the same breath as the names of Mavrocordato, Odysseus and Canaris. One day, before the world even knew that the famous poet was ill, we read in the papers as follows:-- "MISSOLONGHI, 20 _April_ "Our town presents a most touching spectacle; we have all gone into mourning, for our illustrious benefactor died at six o'clock yesterday evening, the 19th instant." Byron had died at the age of thirty-seven, like Raphael; he had died during the Easter celebrations, and thirty-seven volleys were fired--one for each year of his life--in every town, spreading the news of his death from Thrace to the Piræus, and from Epeirus to the Asiatic coasts.