``He prayeth best who loveth best
    All things, both great and small
   For the dear Lord who fashioned him
    He knows and loveth all.''

I fear I may misquote, for I have not ``The
Ancient Mariner'' at my elbow, but even as it
stands does it not elevate the horse-trough?
We all do this, I suppose, in a small way for
ourselves. There are few men who have not
some chosen quotations printed on their study
mantelpieces, or, better still, in their hearts. 
Carlyle's transcription of ``Rest! Rest! Shall
I not have all Eternity to rest in!'' is a pretty
good spur to a weary man. But what we need
is a more general application of the same thing
for public and not for private use, until people
understand that a graven thought is as beautiful
an ornament as any graven image, striking
through the eye right deep down into the soul.

  However, all this has nothing to do with
Macaulay's glorious lays, save that when you
want some flowers of manliness and patriotism
you can pluck quite a bouquet out of those. 
I had the good fortune to learn the Lay of
Horatius off by heart when I was a child, and
it stamped itself on my plastic mind, so that
even now I can reel off almost the whole of it. 
Goldsmith said that in conversation he was like
the man who had a thousand pounds in the
bank, but could not compete with the man who
had an actual sixpence in his pocket. So the
ballad that you bear in your mind outweighs
the whole bookshelf which waits for reference. 
But I want you now to move your eye a little
farther down the shelf to the line of olive-green
volumes. That is my edition of Scott. But
surely I must give you a little breathing space
before I venture upon them.

		    II.

  It is a great thing to start life with a small
number of really good books which are your
very own. You may not appreciate them at
first. You may pine for your novel of crude
and unadulterated adventure. You may, and
will, give it the preference when you can. 
But the dull days come, and the rainy days
come, and always you are driven to fill up the
chinks of your reading with the worthy books
which wait so patiently for your notice. And
then suddenly, on a day which marks an epoch
in your life, you understand the difference. 
You see, like a flash, how the one stands for
nothing, and the other for literature. From
that day onwards you may return to your
crudities, but at least you do so with some
standard of comparison in your mind. You
can never be the same as you were before. 
Then gradually the good thing becomes more
dear to you; it builds itself up with your
growing mind; it becomes a part of your
better self, and so, at last, you can look, as I
do now, at the old covers and love them for all
that they have meant in the past. Yes, it was
the olive-green line of Scott's novels which
started me on to rhapsody. They were the
first books I ever owned---long, long before I
could appreciate or even understand them. But
at last I realized what a treasure they were. In
my boyhood I read them by surreptitious candle-ends
in the dead of the night, when the sense of
crime added a new zest to the story. Perhaps
you have observed that my ``Ivanhoe'' is of a
different edition from the others. The first
copy was left in the grass by the side of a
stream, fell into the water, and was eventually
picked up three days later, swollen and decomposed,
upon a mud-bank. I think I may say,
however, that I had worn it out before I lost it. 
Indeed, it was perhaps as well that it was some
years before it was replaced, for my instinct was
always to read it again instead of breaking fresh
ground.

  I remember the late James Payn telling the
anecdote that he and two literary friends agreed
to write down what scene in fiction they thought
the most dramatic, and that on examining the
papers it was found that all three had chosen
the same. It was the moment when the unknown
knight, at Ashby-de-la-Zouch, riding past
the pavilions of the lesser men, strikes with the
sharp end of his lance, in a challenge to mortal
combat, the shield of the formidable Templar. 
It was, indeed, a splendid moment! What
matter that no Templar was allowed by the
rules of his Order to take part in so secular