favourite book before breakfast. I often read during
meals and sometimes late into the night. I was
seldom without books when travelling, and carried
a few volumes with me. My love of Shakespeare
Was a passion and I never missed seeing a Shakes-
pearian play acted. " Henry Irving's Macbeth
at the Lyceum Theatre, London, in 1890-91 was
like a dream " he writes.*

On his second visit to England in 1892, his
reading continued with the same ardour as before
and we have a list of books purchased by him in
1894.**

While reading the classics of English literature
he was at the same time renewing his acquaintance
with the Latin poets and a more daring attempt
was to take up the study of Greek grammar,
though the interest did not continue very long.
More appreciable success was attained with Ger-
man poetry when he began to read some of Goethe's
lyrics and Schiller's and Heine's.

It would hardly be an exaggeration in view of
all this, to call him a self-educated man. He had
also a very retentive memory. I had the oppor-

*" Apart from the superb mounting of the play and the historical
correctness of costumes, Irving*s inspired acting in some of the parts
as in the dagger scene was almost supernaturally weird." His contempt
for the cinema is not to be wondered at.
**(Hazlitt's Essays, Heine's Traveel Pictures, etc., Ellis' Early English
Romances and Early English Poets, Goldsmith's Works, Grote's Plato and
Aristotle, Disraeli, Lessing, Schiller, Gilfillan's Literary Portraits.
Sydney Smith's Life, Life of Stein, Fairfax Correspondence, Lord
Bolingbroke, Buckingham's Regency, Our Chancellor, Morley's Rousseau,
Southey's Commonplace Book, Life of Gibbon, Eminent Englishmen,
Lews' History of Philosophy, Life of Lyndhurst, History of Jesuits, Mel-
bourne's Papers, Locke's Works, Grote's History of Greece, Neibuhr's
Lectures, Plutarch's Lives, etc.