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particularly admires. Miss LaMotte spoke more forcefully than I would have expected: she is surprisingly handsome when animated. We discussed also the so-called “spiritual” manifestations, about which Lady Byron wrote to me with great feeling. There was talk of Mrs Stowe’s claim to have conversed with the spirit of Charlotte Brontë. Miss Glover, in one of her few interventions, said warmly that she believed such things could and did happen. Ash said he would require foolproof experimental conviction and did not imagine it would be forthcoming. Bagehot said that Ash’s presentation of Mesmer’s belief in spiritual influences showed he was less rigorously confined by positive science than he now claimed to be. Ash replied that the historical imagination required a kind of poetic belief in the mental universe of his characters and that this was so strong with him, that he was in danger of having no beliefs of his own at all. All appealed to Miss LaMotte on the question of the rapping spirits; she declined to express an opinion, answering only with a Monna Lisa smile.
    Roland copied out this passage and read on, but could find no further reference to Miss LaMotte, though Ash was a fairly frequent host and guest. Robinson paid tribute to Mrs Ash’s excellent housekeeping, and lamented that she had never become the Mother she was ideally suited to be. He did not appear to have noticed any extraordinary knowledge of Ash’s poetry in either Miss LaMotte or Miss Glover. Perhaps the conversation, “pleasant and unexpected” or alternatively “extraordinary,” had taken place elsewhere or on another occasion. Crabb Robinson’s records looked odd transcribed in Roland’s own rather cramped script, less confident, less homogeneously part of a life. Roland knew that statistically he was almost bound to have corrupted this text in some way, if only by inadequate transcription. Mortimer Cropper’s graduate students were made to transcribe passages—usually from Randolph Henry Ash—transcribe again their own transcriptions, type them up, and then scan them for errors with a severe editorial eye. There was never an error-free text, Cropper said. He kept up this humbling exercise, even in the days of effortless photocopying. There was no such professional method about Blackadder, who nevertheless noticed and corrected a plethora of errors, accompanying this correction with a steady series of disparaging comments on the declining standard of English education. In his day, he said, students were grounded in spelling and had learned poetry and the Bible by heart. An odd phrase, “by heart,” he would add, as though poems were stored in the bloodstream. “ ‘Felt along the heart,’ as Wordsworth said,” Blackadder said. But in the best English tradition he did not consider it his business to equip his deficient students with tools they had not got. They must muddle through in a fog of grumble and contempt.

    Roland went to the British Museum in search of Blackadder. He had not made up his mind what to say to him, so spent time establishing a position in the Reading Room, under the high dome, which, however high, held, he felt, insufficient oxygen for all thediligent readers, so that they lay somnolent like flames dying in Humphry Davy’s bell-jar as their sustenance was consumed. It was afternoon—the morning had gone on Crabb Robinson—which meant that all the ample, high, soft-blue leather desks along the spokes of the great wheel that radiated from the Superintendent’s desk, ensphered by the Catalogue, were taken, and he had to be content with one of the minimal flat triangular ends of the late-come segments inserted between these spokes. These inserts were ghost-desks, secondary desks, stammering desks, DD GG OO. He found a place at the end of AA (for Ash) near the door. In his first pleasure at being admitted to this inner circle of learning he had compared it to Dante’s Paradiso, in which the saints and