The most influential books, and the truest in their
influence, are works of fiction. They do not pin the reader
to a dogma, which he must afterwards discover to be inexact;
they do not teach him a lesson, which he must afterwards
unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the
lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they
constrain us to the acquaintance of others; and they show us
the web of experience, not as we can see it for ourselves,
but with a singular change - that monstrous, consuming EGO of
ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be so, they must
be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that is
so serves the turn of instruction. But the course of our
education is answered best by those poems and romances where
we breathe a magnanimous atmosphere of thought and meet
generous and pious characters. Shakespeare has served me
best. Few living friends have had upon me an influence so
strong for good as Hamlet or Rosalind. The last character,
already well beloved in the reading, I had the good fortune
to see, I must think, in an impressionable hour, played by
Mrs. Scott Siddons. Nothing has ever more moved, more
delighted, more refreshed me; nor has the influence quite
passed away. Kent's brief speech over the dying Lear had a
great effect upon my mind, and was the burthen of my
reflections for long, so profoundly, so touchingly generous
did it appear in sense, so overpowering in expression.
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