For instance, in
the passages already adduced, I detect and applaud the ear of my
old nurse; they were of her choice, and she imposed them on my
infancy, reading the works of others as a poet would scarce dare to
read his own; gloating on the rhythm, dwelling with delight on
assonances and alliterations. I know very well my mother must have
been all the while trying to educate my taste upon more secular
authors; but the vigour and the continual opportunities of my nurse
triumphed, and after a long search, I can find in these earliest
volumes of my autobiography no mention of anything but nursery
rhymes, the Bible, and Mr. M'Cheyne.
I suppose all children agree in looking back with delight on their
school Readers. We might not now find so much pathos in 'Bingen on
the Rhine,' 'A soldier of the Legion lay dying in Algiers,' or in
'The Soldier's Funeral,' in the declamation of which I was held to
have surpassed myself. 'Robert's voice,' said the master on this
memorable occasion, 'is not strong, but impressive': an opinion
which I was fool enough to carry home to my father; who roasted me
for years in consequence. I am sure one should not be so
deliciously tickled by the humorous pieces:-
'What, crusty? cries Will in a taking,
Who would not be crusty with half a year's baking?'
I think this quip would leave us cold. The 'Isles of Greece' seem
rather tawdry too; but on the 'Address to the Ocean,' or on 'The
Dying Gladiator,' 'time has writ no wrinkle.'
'Tis the morn, but dim and dark,
Whither flies the silent lark?' -
does the reader recall the moment when his eye first fell upon
these lines in the Fourth Reader; and 'surprised with joy,
impatient as the wind,' he plunged into the sequel? And there was
another piece, this time in prose, which none can have forgotten;
many like me must have searched Dickens with zeal to find it again,
and in its proper context, and have perhaps been conscious of some
inconsiderable measure of disappointment, that it was only Tom
Pinch who drove, in such a pomp of poetry, to London.
But in the Reader we are still under guides. What a boy turns out
for himself, as he rummages the bookshelves, is the real test and
pleasure. My father's library was a spot of some austerity; the
proceedings of learned societies, some Latin divinity,
cyclopaedias, physical science, and, above all, optics, held the
chief place upon the shelves, and it was only in holes and corners
that anything really legible existed as by accident.
