For my part, I liked a story to begin with an old wayside inn where, “towards the close of the year 17—­,” several gentlemen in three-cocked hats were playing bowls.  A friend of mine preferred the Malabar coast[2] in a storm, with a ship beating to windward, and a scowling fellow of Herculean proportions striding along the beach; he, to be sure, was a pirate.  This was further afield than my home-keeping fancy loved to travel, and designed altogether for a larger canvas than the tales that I affected.  Give me a highwayman and I was full to the brim; a Jacobite[3] would do, but the highwayman was my favourite dish.  I can still hear that merry clatter of the hoofs along the moonlit lane; night and the coming of day are still related in my mind with the doings of John Rann or Jerry Abershaw;[4] and the words “postchaise,” the “great North road,"[5] “ostler,” and “nag” still sound in my ears like poetry.  One and all, at least, and each with his particular fancy, we read story-books in childhood; not for eloquence or character or thought, but for some quality of the brute incident.  That quality was not mere bloodshed or wonder.  Although each of these was welcome in its place, the charm for the sake of which we read depended on something different from either.  My elders used to read novels aloud; and I can still remember four different passages which I heard, before I was ten, with the same keen and lasting pleasure.  One I discovered long afterwards to be the admirable opening of What will he Do with It?[6] It was no wonder I was pleased with that.  The other three still remain unidentified.  One is a little vague; it was about a dark, tall house at night, and people groping on the stairs by the light that escaped from the open door of a sickroom.  In another, a lover left a ball, and went walking in a cool, dewy park, whence he could watch the lighted windows and the figures of the dancers as they moved.  This was the most sentimental impression I think I had yet received, for a child is somewhat deaf to the sentimental.  In the last, a poet, who had been tragically wrangling with his wife, walked forth on the sea-beach on a tempestuous night and witnessed the horrors of a wreck.[7] Different as they are, all these early favourites have a common note—­they have all a touch of the romantic.

Drama is the poetry of conduct, romance the poetry of circumstance.  The pleasure that we take in life is of two sorts—­the active and the passive.  Now we are conscious of a great command over our destiny; anon we are lifted up by circumstance, as by a breaking wave, and dashed we know not how into the future.  Now we are pleased by our conduct, anon merely pleased by our surroundings.  It would be hard to say which of these modes of satisfaction is the more effective, but the latter is surely the more constant.  Conduct is three parts of life,[8] they say; but I think they put it high.  There is a vast deal in life and letters both which is not