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that he had no love for Scott. And I suppose it was because of his
ignorance of the proper pronunciation of words that he infinitely
preferred any prose to any metrical writing.
A book he browsed over with a recurrent pleasure was Waterton's
Wanderings in South America. He would even amuse himself by inventing
descriptions of other birds in the Watertonian manner, new birds that
he invented, birds with peculiarities that made him chuckle when they
occurred to him. He tried to make Rusper, the ironmonger, share this
joy with him. He read Bates, too, about the Amazon, but when he
discovered that you could not see one bank from the other, he lost,
through some mysterious action of the soul that again I cannot
understand, at least a tithe of the pleasure he had taken in that
river. But he read all sorts of things; a book of old Keltic stories
collected by Joyce charmed him, and Mitford's Tales of Old Japan, and
a number of paper-covered volumes, Tales from Blackwood, he had
acquired at Easewood, remained a stand-by. He developed a quite
considerable acquaintance with the plays of William Shakespeare, and
in his dreams he wore cinque cento or Elizabethan clothes, and walked
about a stormy, ruffling, taverning, teeming world. Great land of
sublimated things, thou World of Books, happy asylum, refreshment and
refuge from the world of everyday!...
The essential thing of those fifteen long years of shopkeeping is Mr.
Polly, well athwart the counter of his rather ill-lit shop, lost in a
book, or rousing himself with a sigh to attend to business.
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