As everyone ought to do under such circumstances, I thought, or
pretended to think, that Marlowe, Beaumont, Fletcher, Ben Jonson,
Webster, and Ford were the equals, if not indeed the superiors, of
Shakespeare.
That was a view with which my father by no means agreed, but with his kindly wisdom he never attempted to condemn or dispute my opinions. He left me to find out the true Shakespeare for myself. This I ultimately did, and ended by being what, as a rule, is wrong in literature, but, I think, right in the case of Shakespeare, a complete idolater.
But though hand-in-hand with Charles Lamb I wandered through the Eden of the Elizabethan playwrights, I by no means neglected the Eighteenth Century. Quite early I became a wholehearted devotee of Pope and at once got the Ode to the Unfortunate Lady by heart. I dipped into The Rape of the Lock, gloried in the Moral Essays, especially in the Characters of Women and the epistle to Bathurst on the use of riches. Gray, who was a special favourite of Leaker's, soon became a favourite of mine, and I can still remember how I discovered the Ode to Poesy and how I went roaring its stanzas through the house. Such lines as
Where each old poetic mountain
Inspiration breathes around
or
Hark, his hands the lyre explore,
were meat and drink to me. The Elegy in a Country Churchyard quickly seized my memory.
Nobody could avoid knowing when I had made a poetic discovery. I was as noisy as a hen that has laid an egg, or, to be more exact, I felt and behaved like a man who has come into a fortune. For me there were no coteries in Literature, or if there were, I belonged to them all. If I heard somebody say that there were good lines in the poems of some obscure author or other, I did not rest satisfied till I had got hold of his Complete Works. For example, when Crabbe was spoken of, I ran straight to The Tales of the Hall and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I even tasted The Angel in the House when I heard that Rossetti and Ruskin, and even Swinburne, admired Coventry Patmore. Though largely disappointed, I even extracted honey from The Angel, though I confess it was rather like a bee getting honey out of the artificial flowers in the case in a parlour window. Still, if I could only find two lines that satisfied me, I thought myself amply rewarded for the trouble of a search. It is still a pleasure to repeat
And o'er them blew
The authentic airs of Paradise.
I felt, I remember, about the epithet "authentic" what Pinkerton in The Wrecker felt about Hebdomadary—"You're a boss word."