Excerpt from Praeterita: Outlines of Scenes and Thoughts, Perhaps Worthy of Memory, in My Past Life I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school (walter Scott's school, that is to say, Homer's, ) I name these two out of the numberless great Tory writers, because they were my own two masters. I had Walter Scott's novels, and the Iliad, (pope's translation, ) for my only reading when I was a child, on week-days on Sun days their effect was tempered by Robinson Crusoe and the Pilgrim's Progress my mother having it deeply in her heart to make an evangelical clergyman of me. Fortunately, I had an aunt more evangelical than my mother and my aunt gave me cold mutton for Sunday's dinner, which - as I much pre ferred it hot - greatly diminished the influence of the Pil grim's Progress, and the end of the matter was, that I got all the noble imaginative teaching of Defoe and Bunyan, and yet - am not an evangelical clergyman. I had, however, still better teaching than theirs, and that compulsorily, and every day of the week. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.