it was dark, without any thought of food or bed. When I could see no longer, I put my little book in my pocket and tumbled down by the side of the stack, where I slept till the birds of Kew Gardens awakened me in the morning. ... I carried that volume about with me wherever I went; and when I lost it in a box that fell overboard in the Bay of Fundy, the loss gave me greater pain than I have since felt at losing thousands of pounds."
As for Lamb's views on the subject of early reading, they are best expressed in his triumphant vindication of Bridget Elia's happily neglected education: "She was tumbled by accident or design into a spacious closet of good old English books, without much selection or prohibition, and browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage. Had I twenty girls they should be brought up exactly in this fashion." It is natural that but few parents are anxious to risk so hazardous an experiment, especially as the training of "incomparable old maids" is hardly the recognized summit of maternal ambition; but Bridget Elia at least ran no danger of intellectual starvation, while, if we pursue a mod-
