No; I repeat, Shakspeare—bless him!—never did me any moral mischief. Though the Witches in Macbeth troubled me,—though the Ghost in Hamlet terrified me (the picture that is,—for the spirit in Shakspeare was solemn and pathetic, not hideous),—though poor little Arthur cost me an ocean of tears,—yet much that was obscure, and all that was painful and revolting was merged on the whole in the vivid presence of a new, beautiful, vigorous, living world. The plays which I now think the most wonderful produced comparatively little effect on my fancy: Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Macbeth, struck me then less than the historical plays, and far less than the Midsummer Night’s Dream and Cymbeline. It may be thought, perhaps, that Falstaff is not a character to strike a child, or to be understood by a child:—no; surely not. To me Falstaff was not witty and wicked—only irresistibly fat and funny; and I remember lying on the ground rolling with laughter over some of the scenes in Henry the Fourth,—the mock play, and the seven men in buckram. But The Tempest and Cymbeline were the plays I liked best and knew best.
Altogether I should say that in my early years books were known to me, not as such, not for their general contents, but for some especial image or picture I had picked out of them and assimilated to my own mind and mixed up with my own life. For example out of Homer’s Odyssey (lent to me by the parish clerk) I had the picture of Nasicaa and her maidens going down in their chariots to wash their linen: so that when the first time I went to the Pitti Palace, and could hardly see the pictures through blinding tears, I saw _that_ picture of Rubens, which all remember who have been at Florence, and it flashed delight and refreshment through those remembered childish associations. The Syrens and Polypheme left also vivid pictures on my fancy. The Iliad, on the contrary, wearied me, except the parting of Hector and Andromache, in which the child, scared by its father’s dazzling helm and nodding crest, remains a vivid image in my mind from that time.
The same parish clerk—a curious fellow in his way—lent me also some religious tracts and stories, by Hannah More. It is most certain that more moral mischief was done to me by some of these than by all Shakspeare’s plays together. These so-called pious tracts first introduced me to a knowledge of the vices of vulgar life, and the excitements of a vulgar religion,—the fear of being hanged and the fear of hell became co-existent in my mind; and the teaching resolved itself into this,—that it was not by being naughty, but by being found out, that I was to incur the risk of both. My fairy world was better!