him our contemporary, and it is worth the while of any young person presently intending deathless renown to take a little thought of them.  They are the source of all refinement, and I do not believe that the best art in any kind exists without them.  The style is the man, and he cannot hide himself in any garb of words so that we shall not know somehow what manner of man he is within it; his speech betrayeth him, not only as to his country and his race, but more subtly yet as to his heart, and the loves and hates of his heart.  As to Goldsmith, I do not think that a man of harsh and arrogant nature, of worldly and selfish soul, could ever have written his style, and I do not think that, in far greater measure than criticism has recognized, his spiritual quality, his essential friendliness, expressed itself in the literary beauty that wins the heart as well as takes the fancy in his work.

I should have my reservations and my animadversions if it came to close criticism of his work, but I am glad that he was the first author I loved, and that even before I knew I loved him I was his devoted reader.  I was not consciously his admirer till I began to read, when I was fourteen, a little volume of his essays, made up, I dare say, from the ‘Citizen of the World’ and other unsuccessful ventures of his.  It contained the papers on Beau Tibbs, among others, and I tried to write sketches and studies of life in their manner.  But this attempt at Goldsmith’s manner followed a long time after I tried to write in the style of Edgar A. Poe, as I knew it from his ’Tales of the Grotesque erred Arabesque.’  I suppose the very poorest of these was the “Devil in the Belfry,” but such as it was I followed it as closely as I could in the “Devil in the Smoke-Pipes”; I meant tobacco-pipes.  The resemblance was noted by those to whom I read my story; I alone could not see it or would not own it, and I really felt it a hardship that I should be found to have produced an imitation.

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.