It is time we should describe them.
Studies they were not, in the sense in which the word is understood at
Uppingham, where a school law declares that "a boy's study is his
castle," and confers upon him what Aristotle calls the "unspeakable"
delight of the "sense of private property." At Borth this could not be.
In very rare cases was a room the one and indivisible belonging of a
single owner; often as many as six shared the table and fireplace. Some
of these tenements had at least the less solid merit of looking
picturesque. Peeping into a Welsh interior, with its stone
kitchen-floor, polished wainscoting, and oak furniture, its walls hung
with German prints of imaginative battle-pieces and Nonconforming
worthies, and its kitchen-dresser with ranks of ancestral crockery, vivid
in light and colour, which catches the eyes first of all things through
the open door, "This," one was tempted to cry, "were the study for me!
Here would I sit in the shelter of the wooden screen which keeps away
draughts and noisy company, and turn the pages of my Livy for the tale of
Cincinnatus, and deeds of rustic heroes; or hear old Horace descant on
the gracious simplicity of life among the Sabines.
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