Sitting under a dormer window on a
shelf above great stores of tea and spices, I became familiar with much
of Hogarth in a big portfolio, with Raphael, there was a great book of
engravings from the stanzas of Raphael in the Vatican--and with most
of the capitals of Europe as they had looked about 1780, by means
of several pig iron-moulded books of views. There was also a broad
eighteenth century atlas with huge wandering maps that instructed me
mightily. It had splendid adornments about each map title; Holland
showed a fisherman and his boat; Russia a Cossack; Japan, remarkable
people attired in pagodas--I say it deliberately, "pagodas." There were
Terrae Incognitae in every continent then, Poland, Sarmatia, lands since
lost; and many a voyage I made with a blunted pin about that large,
incorrect and dignified world. The books in that little old closet had
been banished, I suppose, from the saloon during the Victorian revival
of good taste and emasculated orthodoxy, but my mother had no suspicion
of their character. So I read and understood the good sound rhetoric of
Tom Paine's "Rights of Man," and his "Common Sense," excellent books,
once praised by bishops and since sedulously lied about.
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