144 PRÆTERITA-I

Far on the contrary, there was a hearty, frank, and sometimes even irrepressible, laugh in my mother! Never sardonic, yet with a very definitely Smollettesque turn in it! so that, between themselves, she and my father enjoyed their Humphry Clinker extremely, long before I was able to understand either the jest or gist of it. Much more, she could exult in a harmless bit of Smollettesque reality. Years and years after this time, in one of our crossings of the Simplon, just at the top, where we had stopped to look about us, Nurse Anne sat down to rest herself on the railings at the roadside, just in front of the monastery; -the off roadside, from which the bank slopes steeply down outside the fence. Turning to observe the panoramic picturesque, Anne lost her balance, and went backwards over the railings down the bank. My father could not help suggesting that she had done it expressly for the entertainment of the Holy Fathers; and neither he nor my mother could ever speak of the “performance” (as they called it) afterwards, without laughing for a quarter of an hour.

167. If, however, there was the least bitterness or irony in a jest, my mother did not like it; but my father and I liked it all the more, if it were just; and, so far as I could understand it, I rejoiced in all the sarcasm of Don Juan. But my firm decision, as soon as I got well into the later cantos of it, that Byron was to be my master in verse, as Turner in colour, was made of course in that gosling (or say cygnet) epoch of existence, without consciousness of the deeper instincts that prompted it: only two things I consciously recognized, that his truth of observation was the most exact, and his chosen expression the most concentrated, that I had yet found in literature.¹ By that time my father had himself put me through the two first books of Livy,² and I knew, therefore, what

¹ [Compare what Ruskin says of Byron as “the most accurate of all modern describers” in The Storm-Cloud, § 44 (Vol. XXXIV. p. 44). See also in the same volume, pp. 333, 396.]

² [Compare Vol. XXXIV. p. 582 n.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]