VIII. VESTER, CAMENAE 141

were in their several ways extremely impressive to me. The partly childish, partly dull, or even, as aforesaid,¹ idiotic, way I had of staring at the same things all day long, carried itself out in reading, so that I could read the same things all the year round. As there was neither advantage nor credit to be got by remembering fictitious circumstances, I was, if anything, rather proud of my skill in forgetting, so as the sooner to recover the zest of the tales; and I suppose these favourites, and a good many less important ones of the sort, were read some twenty times a year, during the earlier epoch of teens.

163. I wonder a little at my having been allowed so long to sit in that drawing-room corner with only my Rogers’s Italy, my Forget-me-not, the Continental Annual,² and Friendship’s Offering, for my working library; and I wonder a little more that my father, in his passionate hope that I might one day write like Byron, never noticed that Byron’s early power was founded on a course of general reading of the masters in every walk of literature, such as is, I think, utterly unparalleled in any other young life, whether of student or author. But I was entirely incapable of such brain-work, and the real gift I had in drawing involved the use in its practice of the best energy of the day. “Hans in Kelder,” and “The Comet,” were my manner of rest.

I do not know when my father first began to read Byron to me, with any expectation of my liking him-all primary training, after the Iliad, having been in Scott; but it must have been about the beginning of the teen period, else I should recollect the first effect of it. Manfred evidently I had got at, like Macbeth, for the sake of the witches. Various questionable changes were made, however, at that 1831 turning of twelve, in the*mjcont

¹ [See above, § 86 (p. 78).]

² [The Continental Annual, and Romantic Cabinet, for 1832. With illustrations by Samuel Prout, Esq., F.S.A. Edited by William Kennedy, Esq. (London: Smith, Elder & Co.)]

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