The nuvvles, naturally, differed in subject and even sometimes in treatment. _The Woman in White_ was, I think, written in letters for all the world like _Clarissa_; _Esmond_--which described the founding of a county-family in Virginia, U.S.A.,--was autobiographical; or you might have several characters each speaking in solid autobiographical wads; or several diarists. There was, in fact, no literary convention in particular--there was only the point of view. _Romola_ and _Far From the Madding Crowd_ had to be recognized as of the same ethical family as _Pelham_ or _Lorna Doone_ or they would not do at all. Occasionally disturbing breaths swept across the trout-ponds. The newest novel of Thackeray might cause a great deal of trepidating discussion under the breath, or the latest passionate outpouring of Dickens might cause Mamma to ask dear Papa whether Lucy and Emily ought really to be allowed to read it. Steerforth and Little Em’ly came _very_ near the Knuckle: but the lap-dog died amongst such lamentations and the first heroine so delicately, and such refined retribution overtook alike Steerforth and the young woman that, if _Copperfield_ itself was put on the index of the young ladies’ boudoir, _Bleak House_ which “introduced Society” could not be kept from the fair denizens of that be-chintzed sanctuary. I believe, however, that _Great Expectations_, the last of Dickens’ works to show his passionate compassion for the under-dog, had a pretty rough passage. I came into the world myself at about the hey-day of this national phenomenon, but, by the time I had any real literary consciousness, its supremacy was beginning to be already challenged. My own mother enjoined on me the reading of _Silas Marner_, _The Mill on the Floss_, _Wuthering Heights_, _Sidonia the Sorceress_, _Lorna Doone_, _The Woman in White_, _The Moonstone_, _Diana of the Crossways_, and _Far From the Madding Crowd_. But then my mother was “advanced” and never wore a crinoline. My father thought Dickens was vulgar and though he did not forbid me to read he certainly deprecated my expressing any enthusiasm for--_Bleak House_. He thought too--I don’t know why--that Robert Louis Stevenson was meretricious, except for the _Inland Voyage_. My grandfather, who was considerably more “advanced” than either my father or my mother, first recommended me to read--when I was about seventeen--_Madame Bovary_, _Tartarin de Tarascon_ and _Tartarin sur les Alpes_. He was pleased when at school they gave us the _Lettres de mon Moulin_ of Daudet and a little later made me read _Roderick Random_, _Humphry Clinker_, _Snarleyyow_, _Midshipman Easy_, Waterton’s _Wanderings in South America_, which was all the same as a novel. My uncle William Rossetti gave me _The Castle of Otranto_, _Caleb Williams_, _Frankenstein_ and another novel of Meinhold’s--_The Amber Witch_. I inherited from my uncle Oliver Madox Brown a large number of translations from the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish.