It was the first time I had imitated a prose writer, though I had imitated several poets like Moore, Campbell, and Goldsmith himself.  I have never greatly loved an author without wishing to write like him.  I have now no reluctance to confess that, and I do not see why I should not say that it was a long time before I found it best to be as like myself as I could, even when I did not think so well of myself as of some others.  I hope I shall always be able and willing to learn something from the masters of literature and still be myself, but for the young writer this seems impossible.  He must form himself from time to time upon the different authors he is in love with, but when he has done this he must wish it not to be known, for that is natural too.  The lover always desires to ignore the object of his passion, and the adoration which a young writer has for a great one is truly a passion passing the love of women.  I think it hardly less fortunate that Cervantes was one of my early passions, though I sat at his feet with no more sense of his mastery than I had of Goldsmith’s.

III.  CERVANTES

I recall very fully the moment and the place when I first heard of ’Don Quixote,’ while as yet I could not connect it very distinctly with anybody’s authorship.  I was still too young to conceive of authorship, even in my own case, and wrote my miserable verses without any notion of literature, or of anything but the pleasure of seeing them actually come out rightly rhymed and measured.  The moment was at the close of a summer’s day just before supper, which, in our house, we had lawlessly late, and the place was the kitchen where my mother was going about her work, and listening as she could to what my father was telling my brother and me and an apprentice of ours, who was like a brother to us both, of a book that he had once read.  We boys were all shelling peas, but the story, as it went on, rapt us from the poor employ, and whatever our fingers were doing, our spirits were away in that strange land of adventures and mishaps, where the fevered life of the knight truly without fear and without reproach burned itself out.  I dare say that my father tried to make us understand the satirical purpose of the book.  I vaguely remember his speaking of the books of chivalry it was meant to ridicule; but a boy could not care for this, and what I longed to do at once was to get that book and plunge into its story.  He told us at random of the attack on the windmills and the flocks of sheep, of the night in the valley of the fulling-mills with their trip-hammers, of the inn and the muleteers, of the tossing of Sancho in the blanket, of the island that was given him to govern, and of all the merry pranks at the duke’s and duchess’s, of the liberation of the galley-slaves, of the capture of Mambrino’s helmet, and of Sancho’s invention of the enchanted Dulcinea, and whatever else there was wonderful and delightful in the most wonderful