Publisher's Synopsis
People talk, in novels, about the delights of a first love. One may venture to doubtwhether everybody exactly knows which was his, or her, first love, of men orwomen, but about our first loves in books there can be no mistake. They were, andremain, the dearest of all; after boyhood the bloom is off the literary rye. The firstparcel of these garrulities ended when the author left school, at about the age ofseventeen. One's literary equipment seems to have been then almost as completeas it ever will be, one's tastes definitely formed, one's favourites already chosen. Aslong as we live we hope to read, but we never can "recapture the first fine carelessrapture." Besides, one begins to write, and that is fatal. My own first essays werecomposed at school-for other boys. Not long ago the gentleman who was then ourEnglish master wrote to me, informing me he was my earliest public, and that hehad never credited my younger brother with the essays which that unscrupulouslad ("I speak of him but brotherly") was accustomed to present for hisconsideration.On leaving school at seventeen I went to St. Leonard's Hall, in the University of St.Andrews. That is the oldest of Scotch universities, and was founded by a papal bull.St. Leonard's Hall, after having been a hospitium for pilgrims, a home for old ladies(about 1500), and a college in the University, was now a kind of cross between amaster's house at school, and, as before 1750, a college. We had more liberty thanschoolboys, less than English undergraduates. In the Scotch universities the menlive scattered, in lodgings, and only recently, at St. Andrews, have they begun todine together in hall. We had a common roof, common dinners, wore scarlet gowns, possessed football and cricket clubs, and started, of course, a kind of weeklymagazine. It was only a manuscript affair, and was profusely illustrated. For theonly time in my life, I was now an editor, under a sub-editor, who kept me up to mywork, and cut out my fine passages. The editor's duty was to write most of themagazine-to write essays, reviews (of books by the professors, very severe), novels, 15short stories, poems, translations, also to illustrate these, and to "fag" his friends for"copy" and drawings. A deplorable flippancy seems, as far as one remembers, tohave been the chief characteristic of the periodical-flippancy and an abundant useof the supernatural. These were the days of Lord' Lytton's "Strange Story," which Icontinue to think a most satisfactory romance. Inspired by Lord Lytton, and aidedby the University library, I read Cornelius Agrippa, Trithemius, Petrus de Abano, Michael Scott, and struggled with Iamblichus and Plotinu
