One of these little girls, Minnie Thackeray, became the wife of Leslie Stephen, of whom Mr. Lowell speaks as "that most lovable of men," whose Life and Letters, so full of rich and wondrous friendships, and of deep and subtle charm, is always a midnight companion if taken up in the evening. While our serious-minded librarian may find its chief value in the chapter on "The Struggle with the Dictionary," where as editor, I presume many of us first met with Stephen, (and which would prove invaluable to Lamb's old gentleman) she will find there only a small part of the Real Leslie Stephen, who wrote one day to Edmund Gosse, "No, R. L. S. is not the Real Leslie Stephen, but a young Scotchman whom Colvin has found—Robert Louis Stevenson."
It is a temptation to linger over Stephen's letters to John Morley and Charles Eliot Norton (perhaps his closest lifelong friends), and to the rich list of literary men whom he knew so well through his long years of literary and editorial work. Like those of Lowell and Stevenson, his letters lead one constantly to the reading of his books, wherein again one always finds himself. It were difficult to imagine more felicitous titles of self-revelation than "Hours in a library," "The amateur emigrant," and "My study window." I cannot leave Stephen without a word from the "Letters to John Richard Green" (little Johnny Green) which he edited. As Macaulay used to love to prove the goods he praised by samples of quotation, I will content myself with Green's questioning Freeman, in a long letter full of Early English history: "By the way, have you seen Stubb's Hymn on Froude and Kingsley?
'Froude informs the Scottish youth
That parsons do not care for truth.
The Reverend Canon Kingsley cries:
History is a pack of lies.
What cause for judgments so malign?
A brief reflection solves the mystery,
Froude believes Kingsley's a divine,
And Kingsley goes to Froude for history.'"
Long years ago my eye caught the title, "From Shakespeare to Pope," Gosse, and as I took down the book, I asked, "Well, what was there from Shakespeare to Pope?"—a question which the book answered so delightfully that I read it straight through twice, while the Critical Kit Kats is my particular joy in introducing to friendly books my young student readers, whom I send off armed with it, together with a volume of Fitzgerald, or Stevenson, or the Browning sonnets. Mr. Gosse has such a comfortable and intimate way of saying things that makes one feel it is one's own expression of one's own thoughts. I suppose most of us own to a pocket copy of Shakespeare's sonnets, wherein we have marked many a line, and then Mr. Gosse writes for us, as he sends the sonnets to a friend:
"This is the holy missal Shakespeare wrote,
Then, on sad evenings when you think of me,
Or when the morn seems blyth, yet I not near,
Open this book, and read, and I shall be
The meter murmuring at your bended ear;
I cannot write my love with Shakespeare's art,
But the same burden weighs upon my heart."
Do your friendly books ever find each other out upon the shelves? After reading in Mary Cowden Clarke's "My long life," of her childish, reverent awe towards Keats and Shelley, who were often guests in her father's house, the book found its place next to those poets, and was it Keats who was sitting on the sofa when the same little girl crept up behind and kissed his hand just because she had heard he was a poet? Gilbert White's "Natural history of Selborne," much in the same way stands beside Lowell, in whose "Garden acquaintance," I first learned its "delightful charm of absolute leisure," and here too, when it leaves my study table, stands that dear big book which still claims my leisure hours, "Charles Eliot, landscape architect," one of those rare books with a subtle and unconscious autobiographic touch, when one chances upon the fact that the writer was Harvard's president, telling the story as the brief fore-note says,
"For the dear son,
Who died in the bright prime—
From the father."
But this is all very personal and my only hope is that while I am reading, you are following the example of my sometime youthful nephew, who, on being asked about the sermon one Sunday after church, answered, "Why really, Mamma, I don't know what it was about. I got tired listening, and withdrew my attention and went fishing."
Finally, although we are admonished not to put new wine into old bottles, there fortunately is no admonition against old wine in new bottles, and friendliness is certainly the richest of wine both in men and in books. Nor am I at all certain that in the last analysis it is not the supreme grace which makes possible that joy in life, without which we are of necessity cast into a limbo of outer darkness, and so I commend to you the best of old wine which ever lingers in The Friendly Book.