'As a boy, stonemason Hugh Miller first learned to appreciate the pleasures of literature in the "most delightful of all narratives - the story of Joseph. Was there ever such a discovery made before! I actually found out for myself that the art of reading is the art of finding stories in books, and from that moment reading became one of the most delightful of my amusements". Once Miller had learned to read Scripture as a story, he soon found similar and equally gripping tales in chapbooks of Jack the Giant Killer, Sinbad the Sailor, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. And then, he recalled, from fairy tales "I passed on, without being conscious of break or line of division, to books on which the learned are content to write commentaries and dissertations, but which I found to be quite as nice children's books as any of the others": Pope's Iliad and Odyssey. "With what power, and at how early an age, true genius impresses!"'