From fine I turned to applied art, diverted by a periodical called "The Girl's Own Paper." For a long period this monthly, which I now regard as quaint, but which I shall never despise, was my principal instrument of culture. It alone blew upon the spark of artistic feeling and kept it alive. I derived from it my first ideals of aesthetic and of etiquette. Under its influence my brother and myself started on a revolutionary campaign against all the accepted canons of house decoration. We invented friezes, dadoes, and panels; we cut stencils; and we carried out our bright designs through half a house. It was magnificent, glaring, and immense; it foreshadowed the modern music-hall. Visitors were shown through our rooms by parents who tried in vain to hide from us their parental complacency. The professional house-decorator was reduced to speechless admiration of our originality and extraordinary enterprise; he really was struck--he could appreciate the difficulties we had conquered. During all this, and with a succession of examinations continually looming ahead, literature never occurred to me; it was forgotten. I worked in a room lined with perhaps a couple of thousand volumes, but I seldom opened any of them. Still, I must have read a great deal, mechanically, and without enthusiasm: serials, and boys' books. At twenty-one I know that I had read almost nothing of Scott, Jane Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, the Brontës, and George Eliot. An adolescence devoted to water-colours has therefore made it forever impossible for me to emulate, in my functions of critic, the allusive Langism of Mr. Andrew Lang; but on the other hand, it has conferred on me the rare advantage of being in a position to approach the classics and the alleged classics with a mind entirely unprejudiced by early recollections. Thus I read David Copperfield for the first time at thirty, after I had written a book or two and some hundreds of articles myself. The one author whom as a youth I "devoured" was Ouida, creator of the incomparable Strathmore, the Strathmore upon whose wrath the sun unfortunately went down. I loved Ouida much for the impassioned nobility of her style, but more for the scenes of gilded vice into which she introduced me. She it was who inspired me with that taste for liaisons under pink lampshades which I shall always have, but which, owing to a puritanical ancestry and upbringing, I shall never be able to satisfy. Not even the lesson of Prince Io's martyrdom in "Friendship" could cure me of this predilection that I blush for. Yes, Ouida was the unique fountain of romance for me. Of poetry, save "Hiawatha" and the enforced and tedious Shakespeare of schools, I had read nothing.