76 SELECT ENGLISH PROSE
taught me (so far as I have learned them at all) the
lower and less intellectual elements of the art, the choice
•of the essential note and the right word: things that to
a happier constitution had perhaps come by nature.
And regarded as training, it had one grave defect; for it
set me no standard of achievement. So that there was
perhaps more profit, as there was certainly more effort,
in my secret labours at home. Whenever I read a book
or a passage that particularly pleased me, in which a
thing was said or an effect rendered with propriety,
in which there was either some conspicuous force or
some happy distinction in the style, I must sit down at
once and set myself to ape that quality. I was unsuc-
cessful, and I knew it; and tried again, and was again
unsuccessful and always unsuccessful; but at least in
these vain bouts, I got some practice in rhythm, in har-
mony, in construction and the co-ordination of parts. I
lave thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb,
to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to
Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Ober-
mann. I remember one of these monkey tricks which
ifl-as called The Vanity of Morals \ it was to have had a
second part, The Vanity of Knowledge; and as I had
neither morality nor scholarship, the names were apt;
but the second part was never attempted, and the first
part was written (which is my reason for recalling it,
ghostlike, from its ashes) no less than three times: first
in the manner of Hazlitt, second in the manner of Kus-
kin, who had cast on me a passing spell, and third, in a
laborious pasticcio of Sir Thomas Browne. So with my
•other works: Cam, an epic, was (save the mark !) an imi-
tation of Sordello: Robin Hood^ a tale in verse, took an ec-
lectic middle course among the fields of Keats, Chaucer
.and Morris : in Monmouth^ a tragedy, I reclined on the