PRÆTERITA-II

CHAPTER I

OF AGE

1. THIS second volume must, I fear, be less pleasing to the general reader, with whom the first has found more favour than I had hoped,-not because I tire of talking, but that the talk must be less of other persons, and more of myself. For as I look deeper into the mirror, I find myself a more curious person than I had thought. I used to fancy that everybody would like clouds and rocks as well as I did, if once told to look at them; whereas, after fifty years of trial, I find that is not so, even in modern days; having long ago known that, in ancient ones, the clouds and mountains which have been life to me, were mere inconvenience and horror to most of mankind.¹

2. I related, in the first volume, § 106, some small part of my pleasures under St. Vincent’s rock at Clifton, and the beginning of quartz-study there with the now No. 51 of the Brantwood series. Compare with these childish sentiments, those of the maturely judging John Evelyn, at the same place, 30th June, 1654:-

“The city” (Bristol) “wholly mercantile, as standing neere the famous Severne, commodiously for Ireland and the Western world. Here I first saw the manner of refining suggar, and casting it into loaves, where we had a collation of eggs fried in the suggar furnace,* together with excellent Spanish wine: but what appeared most stupendious to me, was the rock

* Note (by Evelyn’s editor in 1827): “A kind of entertainment like that we now have of eating beefsteaks drest on the stoker’s shovel, and drinking porter at the famous brewhouses of London.”

¹ [Compare Modern Painters, vol. iii. (Vol. V. pp. 253 seq., 295).]

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[Version 0.04: March 2008]