. John La Farge : a memoir and a study . trongliterary interests and evidently the boy had nosooner learned his letters than he was encour-aged to give himself to books. He speaks ofno nursery favorites. If he had them they wereabandoned at a precocious date. When he be-gan to browse on veritable books he was givensufficiently substantial fare, as witness this ac-count : — On my sixth birthday I was presentedwith a bookcase and a library and I sat downto read Robinson Crusoe, in a big illustratedHarper edition with drawings by never reread it until five years ago, at New-port, and
. John La Farge : a memoir and a study . trongliterary interests and evidently the boy had nosooner learned his letters than he was encour-aged to give himself to books. He speaks ofno nursery favorites. If he had them they wereabandoned at a precocious date. When he be-gan to browse on veritable books he was givensufficiently substantial fare, as witness this ac-count : — On my sixth birthday I was presentedwith a bookcase and a library and I sat downto read Robinson Crusoe, in a big illustratedHarper edition with drawings by never reread it until five years ago, at New-port, and the marvellous truthfulness of thismade-up narrative was forced upon me by myown long life. In my library I had VoltairesLife of Charles the Twelfth, the Lettres aEmilie/ Paul et Virginie, Telemaque, theDiscours sur lHistoire Universelle of Bos-suet, and Homer in a French translation, Iforget whose, but it was more enchanting thanRobinson Crusoe. Also the Swiss FamilyRobinson gave me notions of geography and Wild Roses and Water Lily. C 57 3 natural history which I felt to be quite inade-quate but very charming. On the other side the family bookcaseswere filled with the complete works of Vol-taire and other long rows of eighteenth-cen-tury writers; there were the proper books ofa French library, such as Moliere, Corneille,and Racine, and then came the nineteenth cen-tury men, Paul Louis Courier, political andliterary writers previous to 1830, and alsoall the military literature of that period. Therewere the proper English books of all the goodmen, and one beautiful copy of Byron, withthe wonderful copperplates by Turner. Onmy fathers table lay the New Testamentin French, handsomely bound, with some pic-tures, into which he dipped from time to Of course in my fathers library there wasa beautiful set of Balzac, with the famous illus-trations of Tony Johannot, eDon Quixote/andever so many contemporary engravings ofthe Napoleonic period; Napoleon with theKing of Rome on
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