I was aware--I will never tell you
how--that the presence of these articles afforded me encouragement.
The third and last of my pictures illustrated words:-
'My table Thou hast furnished
In presence of my foes:
My head Thou dost with oil anoint,
And my cup overflows':
and this was perhaps the most interesting of the series. I saw
myself seated in a kind of open stone summer-house at table; over
my shoulder a hairy, bearded, and robed presence anointed me from
an authentic shoe-horn; the summer-house was part of the green
court of a ruin, and from the far side of the court black and white
imps discharged against me ineffectual arrows. The picture appears
arbitrary, but I can trace every detail to its source, as Mr. Brock
analysed the dream of Alan Armadale. The summer-house and court
were muddled together out of Billings' Antiquities of Scotland; the
imps conveyed from Bagster's Pilgrim's Progress; the bearded and
robed figure from any one of the thousand Bible pictures; and the
shoe-horn was plagiarised from an old illustrated Bible, where it
figured in the hand of Samuel anointing Saul, and had been pointed
out to me as a jest by my father. It was shown me for a jest,
remark; but the serious spirit of infancy adopted it in earnest.
Children are all classics; a bottle would have seemed an
intermediary too trivial--that divine refreshment of whose meaning
I had no guess; and I seized on the idea of that mystic shoe-horn
with delight, even as, a little later, I should have written
flagon, chalice, hanaper, beaker, or any word that might have
appealed to me at the moment as least contaminate with mean
associations.
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