ABSTRACT
George Saintsbury described his father as of the ‘middle and secretaryish class’, and himself, when he went up to Oxford with a scholarship, as ‘young, shy, rather poor, and only day-schooled’. Temperamentally a romantic, to whom regret was the dearest of all emotions, Saintsbury derived a good deal of happiness from these vanished dreams, which formed a background to his reading and deepened his distaste for ordinary life. To Saintsbury the past was not an illustration of the present, but a refuge from it, and the present tolerable only so far as it was a museum stocked with cultural, religious, and political relics from the nobler ages of mankind. Saintsbury’s far less powerful temperament saved him from Swift’s fate, but his photograph in old age shows him peering out into the world disconsolately enough, as though the opiate of reading were losing its effect.
